


Two Girls at an Oasis

by tehtarik



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: F/F, Happy Ending, I think it's a happy ending, Manglish, Manglish AU, Pre-Rogue One, future space wives, lesbian spiritassassin, more like, nobody asked for this, space husbands? nah, spiritassassin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-05
Updated: 2017-06-04
Packaged: 2018-10-14 08:10:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 25,588
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10532403
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tehtarik/pseuds/tehtarik
Summary: Baze laughs, a hard bark of a laugh. She grabs Chirrut’s ankles and manages to drag Chirrut a few feet. Chirrut's fingers rake trails in the earth. Some of the dirt gets between her teeth. Bitter. She spits.So Baze wants to be like this? Fine. Chirrut can get rough and dirty, too. With all her strength, she pushes her arms off the ground and jabs her legs forward, her ankles breaking free from Baze's grip, and her feet plant themselves into Baze's stomach, knocking the wind out of her. And before Baze can recover, she swings her now free foot into the back of Baze's knee, twisting her body, eel-like, bringing Baze to the ground.It's Chirrut's turn to laugh.They wrestle, tangled up, legs and arms thrashing, shrieking. A dishonourable fight, all the sifu would agree. They grab at each other's heads but neither have sufficient hair for the other to tug on. Until Chirrut catches Baze's left ear and pulls it hard and Baze yells in rage.----(Or Baze and Chirrut, sitting on a wall.)





	1. Chapter 1

**TWO GIRLS AT AN OASIS**

  


**I.**

One summer it rains in Jedha. The first rain in years. Palpitations of rain, heavy like blaster-fire, sheeting off the roofs and awnings.

Jedha, they say, is an old snake sleeping on a rock, growing a city of holy dust on its scales. Now the coils of its streets loosen, dirt unpacking into streams of silt. The drainage systems are overloaded; the water table soars through the mesa, swamping the primitive generators and circuits, plunging the city into darkness. The squatter settlements on the ledges below the city walls liquefy and sludge down the precipice, and their residents come scrambling for shelter in the many temples of Jedha.

In the compound of the Temple of the Kyber, the novices are sent to clear blockages in the drains, dig trenches and divert floodwater away from the main buildings.

Baze does the work patiently, thrusting her shovel deep into the muck, even as water slides down her shorn scalp, into her eyes. Her novice robes drenched with the weight of a second skin.

The third precept of the Guardians of the Whills is this: _immerse the self in service_.

“They should have automated maintenance for this kind of work,” says Danang Sinmukh, a Togrutan off-worlder and Baze’s fellow novice. Danang stabs his shovel into the waterlogged ground and leans his weight on the handle.

“Temple droids haven’t been upgraded in years. They’ll just get their circuits messed up. Can’t handle this kind of weather,” Baze says, shortly. She does not quote the third precept to Danang.

Danang is an off-worlder from the shipyards of Kuat. His family sold their thriving construction business and moved to Jedha after an incident in which an infant Danang tumbled through a maze of belts and cogs, and remained trapped for hours in the interstices of production machinery. Miraculously, he was pulled out alive, though maimed, his right lek severed, a stump at the side of his face.

“Where’s your friend?” Danang says.

“Working the floodwater pump at the back,” Baze lies. Truth is, she has no idea.

Danang snorts. “As if.”

By the time evening rolls around, Baze’s neck and shoulders are stiff, her muscles braided into taut cables. The downpour has thinned to a drip. The interior of the Temple is cell-bright with storm lamps and emergency lighting, bustling with people taking refuge from the rain and the flooded districts.

She finds Chirrut Îmwe behind the kitchens, sitting on an upturned tub. Chirrut has one knee pulled to her chin, and the other leg stretched out like tripwire. A bundle of longan on her lap. Next to her foot, soaking in a puddle, is a turtle, probably escaped from its usually bone-dry pond.

“There you are.” Chirrut smiles beatifically at Baze. She peels a longan with her teeth, spits the tatters of brown skin out and offers the milky globe to Baze. “Where you go? I was looking for you.”

She does not look like she has moved from her spot for hours.

“You’re eating outside of mealtimes?” Baze folds her arms in disapproval, declining the fruit, even as her stomach leaps in protest.

“To meet the demands of the Force,” Chirrut answers. “All is as the Force wills.”

“You don’t even believe that,” Baze scoffs. She leans against the wall, beside Chirrut and tilts her face to the sky. A damp chill is burrowing its way into her skin. The air is turning cold and dense, much too cold for summer. “I heard Tallah say tomorrow we have to go out to the northern boundary and help with the pumps.”

Chirrut folds her arms behind her head and turns her face up to look at Baze. Her cheeks are full of fruit. “You asking me to do something, is it?”

“Forget it,” Baze says. “So I won’t see you at the northern boundary, then.”

“I’ll go.” Chirrut spits out a longan seed. It patters, an onyx eye polished by spit, to the ground. “But not because of any precept of the Guardians. Just for you.”

Baze bites back a retort, because she isn’t sure exactly what to make of this. She turns away from Chirrut, even though Chirrut’s gaze never leaves her. From the corner of her eye, she studies Chirrut, the smugness of her expression, the indolence of her posture. Her hair growing out, wisping and curling around her ears, defying Temple regulations. Defiant, always defiant, in the most nonchalant way possible. Any day now and a Guardian (probably Guardian Tallah) is going to cuff Chirrut on the ear and tell her to tidy up.

For a moment she wonders if it’s possible to bridge that gap between them. Chirrut’s smile is a challenge, complicated and elusive, something that prompts a spike of quite unexplained embarrassment in Baze. She says nothing.

Chirrut reaches down and picks up the turtle from the puddle at her feet. Its clawed appendages twitch.

“This one I’m going to call Ah Choy,” she says.

  


***

  


Baze grew up in the eastern districts, in Amoy Quarter, the eldest grandchild in a family that grew and sold sunflowers.

Her family lives in a large compound, which Baze’s great-great grandparents had built years ago when they immigrated to Jedha City. In the compound there are four houses and one large greenhouse. And in the greenhouse, their livelihood: a maze of substrate-filled troughs, irrigated with nutrient-enriched water and enhanced with her family’s secret fertiliser recipe (which to Baze, seemed nothing more than the shits of various creatures mixed together). The sunflowers that bloom from the troughs are white and scarlet, huge floral discs haloed in petals. These are sold in bunches at the flower markets of Amoy Quarter, as well as the main souk in the central city. Greenery is always in demand in the sandy streets of Jedha.

Baze remembers pruning those stupidly tall plants in the greenhouse. She was the tallest of the children (still is, as far as she knows), so this duty always fell to her. She remembers sitting on the flat roofs of their houses with the comfortable chaos of siblings and cousins, gnawing on kuaci, cutting and drying stalks, or making satchets out of dried petals.

But there has always been a family tradition of sending a child to the Temple to become a novice for a fixed period: an offering of sorts to the Church of the Force, which her forebears converted to after settling in Jedha.

A belief that by doing so, the family will continue to be blessed by the Force for generations to come.

Several of her family members had served for brief periods at the Temple. Her tai kong, her chek-chim, her own Ah-Mak, to name a few. Some of them served for six months, some served for twelve, but they always came home in the end.

So when Baze turned nine, her mothers-- her Ah-Mak and her Ah-Bu—delivered her, an awkward libation, to the Guardians of the Whills. Guardian Mahfouz Douma greeted them beneath the multi-tiered roofs of the entrance.

Guardian Douma grasped Baze by her shoulders and Baze stared back at the Guardian, at their dark kasaya robes, and the prayer beads wound around their wrist, beneath their sleeves.

“Welcome to the Temple of the Kyber,” said Guardian Douma. They smiled in a manner that was cordial enough.

Fear clutched her throat. She studied the courtyard of the Temple, at the anarchic shapes of the paving stones on the ground, sliding and slotting into each other like a logical headache, at the huge braziers where people could light sticks of incense, at the clusters of clay jars like hollow sentries. So different from the noise and the rowdy colour and the smell of fertiliser of home.

A group of novices trooped past, staring at Baze. At her bright dress and the ribbons wound around her thick dark braids.

Ah-Mak was wiping her eyes. “Sayang, it’s only for a year, ya?”

“No need to cry. Anything you need, you can still call or even visit sometimes if the Guardians will let you,” said her Ah-Bu. “You’re only a temporary novice after all.”

“I’m _not_ crying,” Baze said indignantly. “That’s Ah-Mak.”

“May the Force be with you. And the Force bless our family,” Ah-Bu said.

Both Ah-Mak and Ah-Bu kissed her and squeezed her hands until she reddened from all the attention and wished they would turn around and leave already.

And when they finally did, she wished she could go back with them.

  


***

  


Baze is woken in the middle of the night by a palm pressed over her mouth. Her eyes spring open, an oath against her teeth. It’s only Chirrut, crouching on her bed, hissing at her to be quiet. Baze can still smell the fruit in Chirrut’s breath, slightly sour.

“What?” she growls, when Chirrut finally removes her hand from her mouth.

“Oh, you’re awake properly now.”

“No thanks to you.”

“Come on, get up lah,” says Chirrut. “Walk with me a bit.”

“The senior Guardians will not be happy if they catch us.”

“Don’t so pessimist like that, okay. Remember the eighth precept,” says Chirrut.

“Eschew all forms of entertainment, including music, art and literature.” The answer unspools from Baze’s lips, an automatic code. “That what you had in mind?”

“Hmm.” Chirrut frowns. “Maybe I mixed up with the fourteenth precept or something.”

“There are only thirteen precepts.”

“Anyway, you go back to sleep. Sorry for disturbing.” She steps off Baze’s bed and pretend-slouches her way out of the dormitory.

That stupid girl will be caught and punished once again by Guardian Tallah, who’s on the warpath for ill-disciplined and insubordinate novices. Ten strokes of the cane to the palm in front of all the other novices, a standard punishment from Tallah.

Chirrut was once subjected to public caning, but she accepted her punishment with a serenity that no doubt annoyed Tallah even more. Baze, on the other hand, felt her insides contract, her fingernails curving their way into her palm each time the rotan swished downwards, as though trying to inflict upon her own hands the same pain Chirrut must be suffering. But Chirrut never resented anyone. Even after the caning, she clasped her hands together in a gesture of thanks toward Tallah.

Baze swears and tosses off the blanket, struggles into her robes, and runs after Chirrut as quietly as she can.

“Alright, alright. Fuck’s sake.”

Chirrut brightens, but says with some reproach, “Language. We’re still on holy ground.”

“ _How_ someone like you can walk on holy ground, I’ll never know.”

Chirrut takes her hand and leads her along the passageways of the Temple. They slip out into the cloister, skirting the edges of the courtyard and the clay gardens, to a side gate in the Temple walls. Chirrut keys in the access code (of course, she would know it), and before Baze can make any word of protest, drags her outside, beyond the walls.

The streets are silent around the temple, patched with shadows. The ground is still slimy from the rain.

“I am going to ask a very obvious question,” says Baze at last.

“Before you do,” says Chirrut, “the answer is just behind that shoplot. Just in that alley. You’ll see.”

The answer appears to be an abandoned speeder bike parked against the wall. Hardly a standard Jedhan repulsorlift vehicle, probably scavenged parts and scrap metal welded together into the semblance of a working transport. One turbine is exposed, bundles of wires poking through the remains of a polymer shell.

Chirrut turns and faces Baze and spreads her hands out.

“ _No_ ,” says Baze.

Chirrut appears to misunderstand. “What, you scared someone will come looking for it? No one’s claimed it for days and besides, we’re only borrowing.”

“That’s not what I’m worried about.”

But Chirrut is already hauling it upright and gunning the engine, which whines to life. The speeder bike jolts forward and she swings herself onto it.

“I can’t wait for you,” she yells. “No idea how to control this thing, so jump on or go back!”

Baze leaps easily onto the seat of the speeder bike, behind Chirrut. She grips Chirrut’s shoulders as the speeder slants around a corner and scoots down the street.

“Siao, ah? What you doing?” Baze shouts into Chirrut’s ear when they narrowly miss a comms tower.

“I’ll get better with more practice,” Chirrut calls back, her face wild with glee. “Just hold on and don’t fall off.”

It is awkward for her to hold onto Chirrut because she is taller and broader, and also because Chirrut is terrible with manoeuvring the vehicle.

The speeder tears through side streets, looping around blocks, before Chirrut finally directs it out of the city’s western gates, and they descend the ramp cutting down the slope of the mesa, and head out into the tablelands.

“You crazy! Why are we going into the fucking desert?”

“Show you something mah.”

“I don’t like riding pillion by the way.”

“Too late.” Chirrut veers the bike for no reason, swings them side to side like a drunken podracer. “But don’t worry. We’re not going far.”

The desert flashes past them, crags and dunes and scree. She stops the speeder by a large sandstone outcrop. Behind them, the huge mesa looms, and on its tabletop plateau, Jedha City gleams, a staticky, fitful entity. Half of it still blacked out. NaJedha is larger than ever, an unfinished globe blotting out the margins of the night sky. The desert is tinged green by NaJedha’s glow.

Chirrut stares up at the hulking planet. “Look at that.”

Baze becomes impatient. The air is even colder and more condensed out here. “Are we here to look at stars or something, because we could have just done it back at the Temple.”

Chirrut dismounts from the speeder. “There is a place that I’ve heard others speak of.”

They round the corner of the rocky outcrop and Baze’s breath catches in her chest. A line of dunes, greenish in the light, fringing the sky. Before them, however, is a luminescent sickle of a pool. Flat and reflective as the weapon.

“They call this place Khaokhun Oasis. The nearest oasis to the city. All that rain has filled it up and made it grow.”

“It’s--,” Baze struggles with the word _beautiful_.

Beauty is a luxury in the life of a Temple novice. The Guardians say: _do not seek beauty. You find it in what you are given. In bare walls, in dead machines, in repetition, in the hundred-year hush of the clay gardens, in the words that run the circuits of prayer beads. Give up your search for fulfilment and find it in what you already have._

Chirrut pokes her in the ribs. “What are you waiting for?”

She unties the belt from around her waist and peels off her robes.

“Oh. You’re going in,” Baze deadpans.

In response, Chirrut drops her undergarments, the material hitching on her knees before falling to her ankles. She stands completely naked in front of Baze, who tries her hardest to put on her most detached expression. (Chirrut is wiry and ribbed and mostly flat-chested, her breasts pointed and uneven, and her arms are thin but taut with muscle from all the training. Unfamiliar hipbones, a dark fuzzy patch between her legs). Too much air pools in Baze’s lungs and she exhales very slowly.

“Not coming?” Chirrut says, an eyebrow raised.

“In this freezing temperature? Not really, no. But I wish you a happy death, anyway. I will light incense to your memory.”

“The say the water is warm thanks to thermal heating. You know, members of the Elderly Anomids Arts Association make regular trips here during _winter_ to soak in the warmth.”

And without waiting, she runs into the water and plunges in, whooping. She raises her arms above the surface and brings them crashing down. The noise is explosive, euphoric.

“I was right!” she crows. “Warm as your auntie’s lap! You can stand there and take the cold, or you can take a leap of faith!”

“Wah look who's giving big lecture on faith.”

But Baze undresses carefully and steps into the pool. The water is warm. The sands shift beneath her soles. The muscles in her body unknot slowly as she submerges herself. It’s a welcoming sensation, at least until Chirrut swims up to her and blows a stream of bubbles against her bare shoulder.

“Kia si lang!” Baze shouts.

“What do you think?” Chirrut ignores her, mischief in her eyes.

“I think we shouldn’t be doing this.”

Chirrut only laughs and swims away in indolent strokes, towards the centre of the pool. The ripples of her movement reaches Baze; the surface of the water is tentative, skirting around the interruption of her body. She doesn’t follow Chirrut. She floats on her back for awhile, drifting as though the water is a heated cradle, convectional currents of warmth swirling upward from the bottom of the pool.

Vapour begins to curl from the surface. At first, Baze dismisses this as the rising thermal heat, steaming from the depths.

Until the vapours begin to sting her throat and nasal passage, striking painful tears, pinpricks of fire, from her eyes. Her limbs stiffen: first the extremities, then a speedy paralysis grips her thighs and arms and torso, and her body is switched to lockdown mode. She coughs out a cry, perhaps a cry of help, but more likely a warning for Chirrut, who seems to have swum away too far. Water sears her eyes and tips into her frantic mouth as she starts to sink. Her arms are heavy and useless, and the bottom of the pool seems to have fallen away. Her feet and arms come into contact with nothing substantial.

“ _Chirrut_.” Chirrut's name turns to froth from her lips. It is pitch dark beneath the surface of the water.

Baze reaches upward in a burst of strength, and a pair of hands grabs her outstretched arm. Nails sink, grappling-hook fierce, into her forearm, and a different force hauls her upwards, against her drowning weight and the burden of gravity, toward air, toward the surface, algal-green in the glow of NaJedha. She breaks through that sickly sheen and her lungs heave, but her strength is gone. The hands that have pulled her up now lock themselves around her chest like bands, and her head tilts backward into something solid. Chirrut’s chest. Chirrut's chin digging into her shoulder.

Chirrut's words, urgent but reassuring against her ear. “I got you, I got you, don't fight, don't fight me okay! Baze Malbus!”

The desert air is freezing against Baze's bare skin. The ground, hard against her back. A terrific pressure in her lungs. Chirrut's fist comes down hard on her chest and she vomits water, spluttering.

“Just--just lie down for a moment.” Chirrut sounds visibly shaken. She's kneeling beside Baze, her hands are cold on Baze's face. Still naked, water droplets on her goosefleshed skin. In fact, Baze realises stupidly, they're both naked in the middle of the freezing desert. And that they're both idiots.

“You _fuckwit._ ” Baze coughs. “That is _not_ how you resuscitate someone. And. You could have drowned yourself going so far out!”

Chirrut drapes Baze's robes over her shivering form. “I'm sorry. This is my fault.”

She sounds genuinely upset. Seeing Chirrut vulnerable is a new thing. Chirrut is never vulnerable.

“Huh,” Baze says, gruffly. “Don’t worry too much about me. I'm not that fragile.”

Chirrut retrieves her own robes lying in a heap at the water’s edge. The pool glistens with venom. Fumes unfurling into the atmosphere. When she sits down next to Baze, she passes her a small satchel.

“I found this in the speeder’s compartment.”

Inside, an assortment of musty-smelling smoke-pipes, an antique lighter, and a pouch of desiccated heilong leaves.

Baze suppresses a groan.

“It's cold,” Chirrut says, lighting a pinch of the heilong leaves in the receptacle of one of the pipes. She passes it to Baze. “This will keep you warm a bit.”

She lights another pipe for herself. After the needle-thin fumes of the lake, the gritty, almost nut-like flavour of the smoke is comforting. Baze coughs twice before she gets used to it.

The tenth precept of the Guardians: _do not comfort yourself with the intake of substances that neither nourish the body nor the mind._

Guilt crawls through Baze's thoughts.

“What happened in the water?” she says at last.

“Don't know. Natural chemical phenomenon of some kind. I saw you go under and I tried to pull you out. You must have breathed in far too much of that stuff while you were floating about.” Chirrut blows smoke through her rounded lips. She nestles her head against Baze's shoulder. Her hair is wet and prickly on the skin of Baze's neck. “Huh, the Elderly Anomids Arts Association never mentioned anything about these gases.”

“So, a poison pool in the desert. Only fools like you know of this kind of place,” says Baze. “Anomids clearly have different biological tolerances to us, by the way.”

NaJedha has shifted slightly, or Jedha itself has turned away from it. The planet is a disc tipping into darkness. Patches of high density gas on its surface, visible all the way from where they are. Chirrut slips her hand through Baze's and the gesture is startling. Baze does not respond, does not know how to.

“Let's go,” says Baze.

Neither of them move.

  


***

  


Baze remembers her first day at the Temple of the Kyber clearly.

After Ah-Mak and Ah-Bu left. After Guardian Douma led her to an austere dormitory to set her belongings down. After passing through the cloister, the passageways with narrow triangular windows cutting sunlight into gold spires on the walls.

She was taken to the inner courtyard and made to sit on a stool while Guardian Douma cut her hair. They were unsentimental about shearing off Baze's braids; they held her head still, and the pressure on her scalp was trustworthy but unconsoling. Hair fell in wisps, snagging on her eyelashes, clinging to the corners of her mouth. Red and white ribbons came fluttering down to her lap. Guardian Douma had snipped them off her braids.

A few novices stopped to gawk. When Guardian Douma was done, they dressed Baze in the pale grey robes of a Temple novice.

“As long as you wear these robes,” they said, “everything beyond the teachings of the Whills is renounced. You will eat with your fellow novices, learn with them, train with them. Every moment of the life that existed before you put on these robes now ceases to exist. Remember this, Novice, because one day you may choose to complete the challenges of the duan, and take up the path of the full Guardian.”

Baze pressed her hands together and bowed her head.

“Do not be late for the evening meal.”

That night, she learnt her first lesson, listening to a lecture delivered by Guardian Douma to the novices: _before you seek the Force, first, learn to disengage._

The days moved into weeks, into months. Baze adapted. She learnt to disengage, to renounce, to work in the established sequence of the novices’ routines. The others no longer directed their curious looks at her now that she ate the same food as them, learnt the same concepts, uttered the same chants, now that they witnessed how she fell and bruised during training. Just like all of them.

Once a month, the Guardians would perform their Rebuttals in the Disquisition Hall. They sat on long benches facing each other, and the novices would sit on the floor and listen as the Guardians began their debates on the esoteric teachings of the Whills.

Some of the novices dozed off but not Baze. Baze listened to every word, wrestled with comprehension. To understand the Force, the crux of the entire Whills Canon. She was supposed to serve the Temple. The Force was supposed to bless her family.

_Just for one year_ , she told herself. _Just this one year and then I'll be home._

That was what she'd thought.

  
  


***

  


This is how Baze and Chirrut get caught: they stumble back into the Temple compound through the side gate, shivering and smelling of heilong leaf smoke and the stinging bleach-like odour of the desert pool, and nearly walk headlong into Guardian Tallah.

“Guardian,” Baze says, horrified. Her teeth chattering with cold, but it sounds like a clicking of fear, a loss of control, and she hates it. “We--we didn’t mean to--,”

“You were missing from your dormitory for hours,” says Guardian Tallah, coldly. “The Guardians have been scouring the Temple premises and surrounding area for the both of you.”

“I thought you _just_ did a check of our rooms earlier in the evening,” Chirrut blurts out. Baze groans inwardly.

Tallah’s eyes narrow. Her hands are clasped into a knot across her waist. “You are missing the point, Novice Îmwe.”

“I made Baze come with me. It’s not her fault.” Chirrut drops her gaze to the ground.

“I’m sure that you really are a terrible influence,” says Tallah dryly, “but Novice Malbus is not a child.”

“I went on my own choice,” Baze retorts. To Chirrut: “ _You_ don’t have to protect me.”

“There’s enough punishment for the both of you to have double rounds,” Tallah snaps. “Once you’re changed out of your wet clothes.”

Early the next morning, Chirrut is called into a disciplinary council with a few of the senior Guardians.

Baze, on the other hand, is assigned by Tallah to do extra work with the floodwater clean-up around the Temple. And when she finishes around midday, Tallah sends her out with a representative of the Elderly Anomids Arts Association to help with their bookkeeping.

“When you’ve finished, make your way to the Que District and help with the pumps there. One of them is faulty,” Tallah calls after her as she slouches off.

At the end of the day, Baze trudges back into the novices’ quarters, mud-splattered and starving, her boots encrusted with effluent. The other novices are still in the midst of the evening chanting session, except for Chirrut, of course.

Chirrut is waiting on Baze’s bed, lying on Baze’s pillow with her arms behind her head as usual. She hasn’t bothered to take her shoes off. Baze leans forward, scoops up Chirrut’s ankles with one arm and flings them off the mattress. Chirrut flips upright, scowling, to stop herself from rolling onto the floor.

“Shoes off.”.

“You know or not,” Chirrut says, “what I would be instead of training to be a Guardian?”

“A beggar on the streets. What else?”

They both laugh at that. Chirrut has the habit of sneaking out of the Temple during the day and pretending to be a mendicant at the souk. Pilgrims and tourists give generously. Who wouldn’t, especially if they saw a girl with a beatific smile and a shaved head, clad in the coarse robes of a novice? Chirrut has always tried to share some of her credits or food offerings with Baze, who never fails to decline out of respect for the Precepts.

“Actually I want to be like your second auntie.”

“Li Ee? The _fortune seller_?”

“That’s the one.”

“She’s regarded as the crazy auntie of the family.”

“I like her. She damn good one. Always give me food when I see her.”

“When do you even _see_ her?” Baze splutters. “We’re not even supposed to visit family or friends unless we get permission from the elders. Actually, never mind. I don’t want to know.”

Chirrut smiles. “I like your Li Ee. She trades in mysteries. The more mysterious you are, the better you get paid.”

“Oh, so that’s why. You just want to cheat a whole bunch of people.”

“Eh where got lah.”

Baze pulls off her sodden robes and shoes and stands there, barefoot and in damp undergarments, rolling the tenseness out of her shoulders. She rubs her neck and her palm is stained with grime.

Chirrut gestures to a bowl of water and a sponge on the floor, next to the bed. Instead, Baze’s eyes fall onto the covered tray next to the basin.

“Is that food? I’m starving.”

“At least wash your hands and face first.”

Baze glares daggers at Chirrut, who doesn’t flinch. Chirrut sighs. “Let me.”

Chirrut dips the sponge in the basin, squeezes out excess water and dabs it against Baze’s forehead and cheeks. Her face is hard to read, devoid of the usual affection and friendship, always so evident in her easy smile. The water is cool on Baze’s skin and some of it trickles down her neck. She closes her eyes as Chirrut sponges her eyelids.

“You haven’t told me what your punishment was,” Baze says at last. “You got the rotan again, did you?”

“Don’t be stupid. You think I’m what?”

“Then?”

Chirrut puts away the basin and sponge. She reaches for a rough towel and throws it at Baze’s face. “Dry yourself.”

Baze dries the water off her face and neck.

“I had a disciplinary hearing with a few of the Senior Guardians. Nothing much, though. They asked me to rethink my life choices.”

“The Senior Guardians asked you to rethink your life choices,” says Baze in disbelief.

“That’s right.”

“Huh,” says Baze. “And there they had me cleaning muck and drains and spending hours looking at the datasheets of the records kept by the kriffing Elderly Anomids Arts Association. _Don’t laugh, okay_.”

Chirrut straightens the grin out of her mouth. Then her eyes glaze over and she looks past Baze.

“The Guardians asked me if I wanted to continue with the way of life here at the Temple. They said the life of a Guardian is not suited for everyone and that I do have a choice.”

Baze suddenly forgets to breathe. Her syllables are cable-tense. “And?”

“I only stay for two reasons.”

“Master Ilzah?” Baze says.

A curt nod.

“And the other reason.”

Chirrut throws her hands up, irritated. ‘The other reason is your stupid face. The food will get stone cold. Cold food gives you wind, or something. So start eating already.”

She picks up the tray from the floor and sets it on Baze’s bed. There’s a bowl of lukewarm rice, overlaid with a mesh of pickled cabbage. A dish of cut chilli at the side.

Baze feels that old twang of guilt in her chest as she shovels rice into her mouth. Like the rice has gone down the wrong way, blockading her oesophagus and lungs. She’s fifteen now and will be ready for her third duan testing soon (Chirrut is still struggling to qualify for first duan). And while she’s still far from becoming a fully-fledged Guardian, the Elders often encourage novices who are further along their studies to start observing the practices of full Guardians. And one such practice is to abstain from eating between midday and midnight.

“You’re still a novice,” says Chirrut, _not_ helpfully, and that’s all it takes for Baze to finish scoffing down the rice.

  


* * *

  


So why did Baze stay on at the Temple?

She herself isn’t sure.

But on what was supposed to be her last night at the Temple, during her last meditation session, she closed her eyes and contemplated her family.

Ah-Bu and Ah-Mak and her siblings and cousins and grandparents, all waiting to welcome her home. Waiting to thank her for doing her part, for bringing to the family the continued blessings of the Force. Baze Malbus, the good granddaughter, bringer of blessings and pride, welcomed back into the tangle of her family. 

Her family that was going to grow sunflowers until the end of time. They were never going to leave that home compound in Amoy Quarter. 

And she would go back to all that, back to pruning plants and selling flowers at the souk. Jostling with her siblings, basking in comfort, having her mothers close by always. She had always been content to do that, but now the thought filled her with dissatisfaction.

Perhaps she had found some measure of comfort in the sparse and regimented life of the novice. Perhaps all the lessons, chores and training had altered her somehow, all that cryptic talk of the Force.

Or perhaps it was because that Baze had grown to love the Force.

The knowledge that it sang in resonances circumnavigating the scope of her human ears, moved in enigmatic wavelengths around her body and mind, impelled her along pathways pre-established and purposed for her, long before the galaxy disgorged the amount of dust needed to craft her form into existence.

Perhaps within the confinement of the Temple, there was purpose to be found. And so she stayed, seeking this purpose in the ever-deepening circles that was the calling to the life of a Guardian.

  
  
  



	2. II

**II.**

 

Chirrut begins losing her sight when she is seventeen.

First, there are fleeting spells of half-blindness, when parts of her central vision smudge, colour turning limp and edges bleeding out. Like looking through lenses spotted with fog.

She angles her head, uses the outskirts of her sight to see around these disturbances.

Over time, these spells of blindness become more frequent, and the patches of visual fuzz spread outward, infecting her peripheral vision, until the whole world loses any semblance of form, nothing more than a heat shimmer in the desert.

“A case of strong photosensitivity, possibly seasonal,” says Guardian Thanh, the Temple medic, at first. Apparently, NaJedha is at a position where it is reflecting the greatest amount of sunlight down onto its moon. “You’ll get better when Jedha moves further along its orbit, into the shadow of the planet.”

“Since when this kind of thing happen to me,” Chirrut says, sceptically. “I think it’s the kyber.”

She hates the kyber.

She's never seen those mysterious underground chambers full of raw kyber--only full Guardians are allowed access--but she hears them all the time. Their sound, sharp as needles, setting her teeth on edge. They have no tune but are the essence of discord. Too often she has dreams of herself splintering from the inside out, with bleeding eyes and withering gums, gutted by the parasitic noise of the kyber.

“It isn't the kyber,” Guardian Thanh answers. “The kyber may be causing more trouble for you now, but in time, and with due training, you will learn to synchronise your thoughts with its resonances.”

_How you know? You hear them meh?_ Chirrut does not say.

The novices learn early on about _Suffering_ , an inevitability of this life, as well as the first Virtuous Stone to be passed along the Path of Unbinding in the Force. _Suffering_ , the best teacher of patience.

Guardian Thanh prescribes her a range of specialised optic eye drops. Sometimes Guardian Thanh makes her stay in a room with the blinds sealed and a cloth tied over her face, to rest her eyes and let the optic drops take effect.

At least she gets to miss some of the chores.

During these times, Baze comes to visit her in the infirmary. Baze doesn’t like the infirmary much; she’s rarely sick and is only used to her mothers’ herbal cure-alls. Baze messes around with the medical equipment, pushing buttons on them, switching screens and zooming in on the randomest details of holo-scans until the usually cool-headed Guardian Thanh loses their temper and threatens to ban her from visiting.

“Got nothing to do. Read me something,” Chirrut asks Baze one day, during a particularly bad spell of blindness, which had started to develop in the middle of training. Baze had to guide her to the infirmary as her vision mulched over and brilliant gold specks floated across the blurred mass of her eyesight.

Baze shifts beside the blue med bed. “I can read you some verses from the Scriptures of Self-effacement. I'll go download a copy from the library.”

“Don’t want. Get me something with a proper _story_ in it,” Chirrut protests. “No suttas, nothing from the scriptures.”

“Can't.” Baze shrugs, indifferently. “Eighth precept.”

_Self-fulfilment feeds the empty spiral of the constantly hungry self. Break away from the trap of self-fulfilment. Eschew music, literature, art and other forms of entertainment as much as possible._

“Whatever,” says Chirrut, eyebrows knitted into a sulk. “Just read me something, can or not?”

So Baze borrows a datapad from the Temple library, loaded with all the texts of the Whills Canon and reads verse after verse of one of the suttas to Chirrut.

Chirrut shuts her eyes behind her blindfold and says nothing. Because she isn't really listening to the endless quatrains of preachings, not really, no. She only follows the prickly cadences in Baze's voice, the mispronunciations, the way Baze gives up at certain words, mumbles the tail-end of long verses, and then runs out of breath. She can tell that Baze gets thirsty after reading for too long, because her voice breaks into grainy syllables, take on the texture and sound of sandpaper.

Baze doesn't stop reading, though, and she won't until Chirrut tells her to.

 

***

 

Chirrut grew up in the Orphanage of the Whills, which is run by the Disciples of the Whills, a sister order to the Guardians. The Disciples have their own (much smaller) Temple in Pousaat Quarter near the northern boundary of the Holy City.

Nobody could tell her anything about her life before the orphanage, only that she was found one morning on the doorstep, an infant half-dead from hypothermia. It took months for her to be nursed back to health.

“You had no place in this world,” Disciple Peloi Balan, who was head of the orphanage, told her. “You had no origins. So we made room for you here.”

All through her years growing up, she was always aware of a faint ringing in her ears, metallic tremors. They sounded like tiny warning signals, so remote, and nobody understood when she tried explaining. So she learned to ignore them.

Until the day Ilzah-sifu, a Guardian of the Whills, visited the orphanage.

The orphans conglomerated at the windows and behind doorways, all trying to snatch a glimpse of the legendary Ilzah-sifu. Those famed charcoal-hued vestments of the Guardians that they wore. The heavy staff in their left hand and in contrast, the limp right sleeve that hung like an accessory fold of their robes. The orphans could only speculate how Ilzah-sifu lost their right arm, and why they won’t install a cybernetic replacement, like any other person who loses a limb.

Everyone knew the stories about them.

Supposedly the best fighter in the Holy City. Practitioner of the arcana of zama-shiwo. How they were the best shot with a lightbow bowcaster, heavily modified to optimise one-arm use.

How they were reputedly from the Jedi order, but renounced the faith and took up the black gaa saa of the Guardians of the Whills. How they once rode a speeder straight up the open hatch of a flaming cargo ship and rescued three trapped crew members, seconds before the whole transport exploded.

And of course, half the city had witnessed their demo, at one of the many street parades during chor yat of the last New Year. Ilzah-sifu had stood in the middle of a circle of sculptures. The sculptures had the bodies of galactic peoples of various shapes and anatomies, but with jars instead of heads. _Demons of emptiness_ , the sculptures were called. The demons were veined with scarlet Jedhan schelorite so they gleamed blood-seared in the midday sun. Ilzah-sifu bowed before each clay demon, thirteen bows in total, and then tapped their staff twice on the ground and stood still. The crowd held its collective breath. Ilzah-sifu suddenly sprang to life, and with a single lightning-fast strike of their staff, smashed all thirteen clay sculptures to smithereens. Shards rained down on the cheering onlookers. Shortest demo ever.

Ilzah-sifu, everyone said, went from stasis to incredible speed with hardly a transition between.

On the day Ilzah-sifu visited the orphanage, Chirrut was pretending to be sweeping the compound (something she would never do voluntarily).

Ilzah-sifu strode through the doorway, greeting Disciple Balan. The ever-present vibrations in Chirrut’s ear spiked. She had never heard the ringing so loud or so jarring before, and it clung, a barbed aura, around Ilzah-sifu.

She trailed them throughout the orphanage as they conversed with Disciple Balan, darting around corners and trying to remain out of sight.

Until finally, they turned around and demanded that she come out from behind the door where she was hiding.

Chirrut reluctantly stepped forth.

“There must be a bounty on my head,” said Ilzah-sifu, looking down at her, eyebrow raised. “Or is there some other reason why you’ve followed me all this while?”

Ilzah-sifu had eyes of sharpened blades and a face so angular that it was rumoured to have been cut into shape by the winter winds of the desert. Chirrut stared at them, nine years old and rude, fascinated by their empty right sleeve, but not as fascinated as the warped staff they held, with the metal pod perched on top. The vibrations were loudest and most dissonant around that staff of theirs.

“Not my fault,” she said. “You’re so noisy!”

“Chirrut,” said Disciple Balan sharply. “Don’t be rude.”

To Ilzah-sifu, Chirrut pressed on: “You sound like broken bells. Or like disturbance in a commlink.”

A grin split Ilzah-sifu’s severe face. They knelt, so she was level with them. They held the staff out to her, the metal pod angling forward. “Place your forehead against the crystal containment lamp.”

She did and winced. The noise consolidated into a thorn, pushing slowly through her eardrums.

Ilzah-sifu pulled the staff away, satisfied. ‘Disciple Balan, you have a special one here. She is attuned to the kyber.” To Chirrut, they added, “What do you know about kyber crystals?”

“Nothing.”

They laid their hand on her forehead, as though giving her a blessing. “Good.”

She was splitting to the seams with questions about Ilzah-sifu’s strange diagnosis; Disciple Balan could not keep her away from them for the rest of their visit.

Ilzah-sifu only said: “If you agree to come with me and transfer to the Temple of the Guardians, you will learn more about the Kyber and the Force. But it will take time. And that is something else you need to learn, too.

“Yes,” Chirrut nearly shouted. “I want to go. I want to become Guardian. Like you.”

They smiled at her. “You have good spirit. Let’s see if it wins the test of time.”

In the days that followed, Ilzah-sifu visited once again to arrange her transfer to the Temple of the Kyber. Chirrut wasn't sorry to leave the orphanage. It was common for the orphans to be initiated into various other faiths and religious orders across the Holy City, though hardly any of them were selected by the Guardians, and certainly not by someone like Ilzah-sifu.

Now, though. Now, a different story.

Now, Chirrut is not entirely sure if she made the right choice becoming a novice at the Temple of the Kyber.

The years had passed, and she fell into step with the regimented life at the Temple. The novelty of training to be a Guardian, to be of service to the peoples of the Holy City, wore off within weeks. She struggled through her learning. Still does.

Unlike Baze, she finds no joy in the scriptures of the Whills, or in perusing the accumulated commentaries and discourses of the Guardians from aeons past. The precepts, the chants and prayers, the Quatrains and the other suttas. The chores and the community service. The deep stretches of silence that they have to keep.

And every day and every night, the choruses of the still-mysterious kyber trouble her, more abrasive than ever, penetrate her thoughts and disrupt her concentration. She is unable to meditate.

 

***

 

“We need to get out of Jedha,” Baze tells Chirrut.

She swings her staff at Baze in response but Baze blocks the blow easily.

“I'm serious wei.” Baze ducks under the arc of Chirrut's practice staff, but the wood still clips the top of her head.

“Me also,” says Chirrut. “Serious I want to kautim this round already.”

“Jedha is a medical backwater.” Baze leaps backward, away from the reach of Chirrut's next swing. “But if we go somewhere more modern, a more advanced planet with better med tech, maybe they can heal your eye condition.”

“No money lah,” Chirrut grunts unhelpfully. She lets loose a sharp kick which connects with Baze’s knee, and smiles in satisfaction when Baze curses and loses her balance.

Baze gets up again. “I can borrow credits.”

“Hah, from who? Loan shark ah?”

“Stupid! My family, lah. My mothers. They’ll lend me credits if I ask. We can go Coruscant. Danang Sinmukh said that their surgeries there have the best med droids and equipment.”

Chirrut studies the hesitance in Baze’s face. Baze has not spoken to her family in ages, and has not visited in years. She speaks relatively little about them, and always in a perfunctory manner.

She starts attacking Baze again with renewed vigour, landing kicks at Baze’s calves and knees, her staff pummelling Baze’s solar plexus. Baze parries and swerves distractedly.

“What d’you think?” Baze gasps when Chirrut raps her staff against the side of her jaw. It takes a lot of hits to bring Baze down.

“A Core planet? I’ve never been that far before,” says Chirrut, uninterested. “Never even left Jedha before. Anyway, you’re supposed to be preparing for your fifth duan this year.”

“I can delay it. The elders will understand what. I mean we’ll come back, isn’t it?”

“See first.”

But Baze seems to have made her mind up. Late one night, Chirrut searches for her and finds her in the comms room, sending a message to her family in Amoy Quarter. Baze, talking to her family, all for Chirrut’s sake.

She listens just outside the room to Baze’s rough accent, the familiarity of her voice speaking in her home dialect with various family members. From what she can hear, it sounds a bit of a strained conversation.

Chirrut leans against the doorframe, a dull ache in her chest. She listens and she listens. She slips away before Baze sees her.

 

***

 

The truth is, Chirrut’s eyesight worsens at a rate that only she knows. She stops detailing the increasingly dire symptoms to Guardian Thanh. And then she stops telling Baze. Because what can they do, anyway.

Baze’s optimism, for all its endearing qualities is a stone of dread in her chest, gathering weight each day.

Some days are fine. Other days are passing blurs in her deteriorating vision. Colour runs and rots, turning grey and soupy. At nights, when she steals out of the Temple (she doesn't bring Baze with her any longer), the lights of the streets and windows expand into huge, indistinct halos.

To make matters worse, during these spells of blindness, the sound of the kyber increases in volume, almost rendering her deaf as well as blind.

She goes to see Ilzah-sifu about the kyber.

As a Senior Guardian, they are allotted their own space in the Temple. Ilzah-sifu’s room is sparsely furnished, except for a red prayer mat on the floor and a cabinet full of ancient-looking books - the entire Whills Canon, hand-scribed by a Guardian long ago, along with various commentarial literature collected over the years. The walls are ledged with layers of shelves filled with jars and pottery bowls, all sculpted from native clay veined with schelorite. She can't actually see the schelorite, - the jars are mud-coloured smudges; but she remembers how they look like.

Ilzah-sifu is sitting on their prayer mat, cross-legged, almost idle. “Imwe-novice.”

She sits down in front of them. “Sifu, I’ve come to ask about the kyber.”

“What I told you all those years ago still holds,” Ilzah-sifu answers.

_Novices are not permitted in the kyber chambers, only full Guardians. Especially not you, Imwe-novice, because you are far too sensitive to them. You need to complete your novice training first._

“I can’t concentrate on anything with their noise. What use are they to me that I can hear them?”

“You know that they are attuned to the Force. As are you,” Ilzah-sifu answers.

Chirrut fights the urge to roll her eyes. The Force, again. “I don’t feel different from anybody else.”

“That’s because you’re not different from the others. Is that all?”

“If you mean is that all I came to ask, then yes.”

Her eyes are drawn to their right shoulder, where there is no arm and the gaa saa sleeve flows, bodiless cloth.

Ilzah-sifu gestures toward the shelves on the walls. “Fetch me a bowl suitable for the burning of Qatameric incense.”

She won’t be able to pick out an individual bowl from the crowded shelves. The correct receptacle, she knows, is narrow, with a bulb-base and a sinuous, snake-like neck. The smoke of burning Qatameric incense can be molded briefly, so it retains its snake shape as it is released into the air.

But today is one of the days when her vision cannot detect edges. Everything is a grotesque murky continuity to her.

Chirrut scowls. “I don’t know which jar.”

She hears Ilzah-sifu shifting their knees. The movement of fabric. Maybe if she closes her eyes, then she’ll look less like idiot with her wandering gaze.

“What you hear,” says Ilzah-sifu, “is the sound of potential.”

“Meaning what.”

They ignore her. “The incomprehensible sound of potential without a key to decipher it. And that key is faith.”

She has to restrain herself from scoffing. Ilzah-sifu will not take that lightly. “Sifu, you sound like Baze.”

“Malbus-novice is strong in her faith. Dedicated to the teachings of the Guardians. You, Imwe-novice, are a good student of zama-shiwo, and yet you will go no further if you do not have a mote of faith.”

“Faith,” says Chirrut, “is not something I control. It just happens. And it never happen to me also.”

“Instead of talking back always, you go and think about what I said. Meditate. If you can. If you are willing.”

She gets up to go. She’ll do something about her eyesight. But she won’t go to the infirmary, not for the weak medications dispensed by Guardian Thanh. And she won’t bring Baze into this.

“Imwe-novice,” Ilzah-sifu says. Their voice has slowed down, deepened, adopted the tone used for chanting mantras. “What do you think the Force tells you through your studies and observations of it?”

She puts one foot toward the door. Then another foot. What studies? What observations? Hah. The outline of the door inches toward her, growing distinct. “Nothing. I don’t know.”

“Good,” says Ilzah-sifu.

 

***

 

All novices are given the chance to be selected to practice the art of zama-shiwo under Ilzah-sifu’s instruction.

In Chirrut’s second year after initiation into the Temple, thirty or so novices of various levels of training, including Baze, assembled for selection. They were excited, the lot of them, at the prospect of being chosen to unravel the secrets of zama-shiwo. Possibly achieve legend status. Not unlike the sifu.

Ilzah-sifu came out into the training yard. They cast a roving eye at the clustered group and ordered everyone to arrange themselves into three impeccable rows of equal length.

“Now,” said Ilzah-sifu once they were satisfied with the rows, "wait for me in silence and in this order until I come back.”

They went back inside the Temple. Chirrut glanced at Baze next to her. Baze shrugged.

Ilzah-sifu was gone a long time. The novices began to shuffle their feet and grumble. Chirrut rolled her shoulders, stretched, yawned, windmilled her arms and hit Baze and a couple of others standing too close to her. Baze grimaced but kept her peace.

“What the hell is this?” Danang Sinmukh demanded, kicking at the hard dirt on the ground. “Has Sifu forgotten about us?”

“Maybe it's a test,” said another.

Only Baze remained still. _Order and silence_ , Ilzah-sifu had said. Baze would always obey instruction from the elders as faithfully as she could. She had a kind of sturdy discipline and scowling grace that Chirrut lacked.

Chirrut began to whistle. She badly wanted to provoke Baze, elicit a reaction out of her.

After what seemed like an hour, Ilzah-sifu came out into the yard. They walked in between the rows and flicked their hand dismissively at the novices as they passed. “You. You. You and you. All may go. You will not be learning zama-shiwo this year.”

Surprisingly, Baze was among the first ones to be dismissed. Baze, who had been standing so silently and so poised in her spot.

“ _Why_?” Baze practically exploded at Ilzah-sifu. “You haven’t even tested us properly! What did I even do wrong?”

“Malbus-novice,” Ilzah-sifu said, unfazed. “You will make a good fighter and an exceptional defender of the Temple, but you are not suited to the style of zama-shiwo.

That was the only explanation Ilzah-sifu would give to all the dismissed novices. Soon about two-thirds had been sent away, and they dragged their feet back into the Temple, flinging up hands to the skies. Only Baze did not leave the yard completely, leaning against a pillar by the doorway, watching Chirrut.

“Wait here until I come out again,” Ilzah-sifu said to the remaining novices, eyeing them all with disinterest before they turned and headed back inside.

Danang cursed. “Sifu, can't you just tell us what we're meant to be doing?”

But they ignored him and slammed the door behind them.

Chirrut snorted.

“Laugh for what?” Danang snapped.

“Your face lah. You should just give up and go in.”

Danang sneered. “ _You_ don't even believe in the Force. Sifu will see through you in no time. What is the great unbeliever even staying out here for, wanting to learn zama-shiwo?”

“To kick your teeth out,” said Chirrut. She was spoiling for a fight.

Danang shoved her and she shoved him back. They were just about to start kicking at each other's shins when the other novices, including Baze, intervened.

“Eh, don't gaduh lah. Chill lah both of you,” said one of them.

Baze was more direct. She pulled both Chirrut and Danang away from each other. “You two fucking serious or what?”

Chirrut spat. “I’ll go stand somewhere else.”

She moved down the end of the line. Ilzah-sifu was gone a long time. The wind picked up as the day drifted into evening. A sanitation droid with a faulty navigation system passed through the training yard on one of its daily rounds and doused them all with anti-parasite spray. Two and a half hours passed and six novices gave up and went in.

Chirrut’s legs ached from standing for so long and the cold air wrapped around her, turned her lips blue. Baze had gone in for evening chants, and she missed watching Baze’s broad form leaning against the pillar, arms folded.

She did not know why she was still staying out here in the yard. She blinked grit out of her eyes. The chorus of the kyber crystals rose and fell in her head. Arbitrary spikes of sound, uncoordinated, no harmony. Tuneless disorder.

By the time Ilzah-sifu came out again, it was night. NaJedha had inflated across the atmosphere, drenching the Temple with its pale malachite gleam. Only four novices remained, including Danang Sinmukh.

“So,” said Ilzah-sifu as they inspected the last four. “It seems that the Force has selected the four of you. I will train you all in the art of zama-shiwo, in addition to your usual training.”

Meanwhile, Baze carried on with the standard novice training.

She grows into a good fighter of enormous strength. But she doesn’t learn zama-shiwo.

 

***

 

Chirrut gets injections through both her eyes at a medical facility in the cellar of a shadowy textile shop.

It’s a truly questionable place, which is why no questions are asked of her.

The medic wears a sand filtration mask with the vent slanting upward like a sneer. Chirrut resists the urge to sneer back at his mask. He takes all her credits, all the generous donations from passing pilgrims and other off-worlders, tipped into her alms bowl when she sits at the souk.

She lies on a metal table, on an old towel spread across the surface, white harsh light shining down on her face. A rundown medical droid that looks like it has been reprogrammed far too many times to bypass standard galactic medical protocol does a couple of quick diagnostic tests and then administers the needle-shots through both her eyeballs. She tries not to flinch.

After two hours of sitting in that cellar facility, pressing fluid-soaked pads to her eyes, the stinging goes down, and the white flashes in her vision subside. The blurry patches of her central vision shrink until she can see with reasonable clarity. A floater crawls along the margins of her sight.

She leaves the underground medical facility, steps into the textile shop, which seems to be constructed of tarp and cheap polymer sheeting rather than anything concrete, and out into a back alley that connects into the main souk of the Central District. She wanders through the souk, the jostling crowd, the peddlers and carting droids, waterhawkers wearing frames hung with bottles and flasks of liquids, past retired nuns, veteran off-worlders. Past the hissing portable stoves, the stalls selling local produce, mounds of greasy pastries, fabrics, holy totems embedded with specks of kyber, or engraved with special prayers.

Jedha City splits open before Chirrut, unhooking the many throats of its alleyways like a myriad of snake mouths. Washing lines and power cables crisscross the lanes, cluttered with benches and backway stalls and groups of people smoking heilong leaf as well as the far more potent bailong leaf from glass tubes. Playing sabacc and tiles on folding tables.

She must be nearing Amoy Quarter now.

An elderly auntie is sitting at a table outside a tea shop. An empty cup before her. A holopad wired to an antique abacus, beads whirring and clacking into place by themselves, working out some unknown equation. The tea shop window is full of less-than-holy ads sliding through the streaked glass, one after another.

Next to the auntie's table, carved into the sandstone wall of the alley like a cave, is a small shrine. The clay figure in the shrine gleams red-gold in the muted light of the alley. Jedhan schelorite.

Chirrut sits down opposite the auntie. The auntie doesn't look up for awhile. The screen of her holopad is a whirl of figures and symbols, different permutations of fortunes or futures to be sold. The beads of the wired abacus shuffle and reshuffle, allocating weight to this side or that side of certain equations, scrambling for balance. Time to time, the auntie drags a finger across the screen, redefining parameters of her homemade algorithm.

The auntie is fretful and osteoporotic, her shoulders thin and curved like claws, hair scraped into a severe bun at the nape of her neck. She is Li Ee, Baze's second auntie, the fortune seller, the crazy one, in Baze’s own words.

“Ah,” says the auntie. “It's you again, my Baze's friend from the Temple.”

“Chirrut,” says Chirrut cheerfully.

“The one who can hear the kyber. Baze told us long time ago. At least last time she still call back home. Now no more already. Where's my Baze ah? How come she don't visit her family?”

“Temple regulations, auntie. I'm sure Baze mentioned to you.”

“What kind of lousy excuse is that. That cha bor not filial one.” The auntie reaches for a satchel at her feet. She brings out a small bundle wrapped in cloth. Three snow-white mantau are nestled in the middle. She pushes the bundle toward Chirrut. “Nah. You take. One for you. One for Baze,” then she flicks her thumb toward the shrine in the wall. “One for luck.”

“I don't need luck,” says Chirrut. “Not sure I believe in it, anyway.”

“Then what you need?” The auntie’s abacus goes silent. Her holopad powers down.

“I have Baze.” The words dart from Chirrut's lips before she can stop them.

What would Baze think if she heard them? Baze would pretend they were a mistake out of polite embarrassment. Baze would look somewhere else, pretending to be distracted by some passing sight or other.

Sometimes she wants to shake Baze. Shout at her for being thick.

Shout at her, _don’t you want anything more from me_. Shout at her, _stop pretending!_ Shout at her, _I can see right through you, you’re so obvious, how obvious can you get!_

And also shout at her, _it’s okay._ If it can even be shouted. It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay.

“Huh,” says the auntie. She moves as though to start up her holopad and abacus again, then stops. “You want auntie to give you your fortune? All you do is answer my questions and make the prayer. Normally auntie sell, but this time auntie give you. No charge.”

“Not today, auntie.”

The auntie reaches across the table and places two fingers on Chirrut's forehead, right between her eyes. Her vision goes a little blurry as it adjusts to the nearness of the auntie’s hand.

“Girl, you look sick,” says the auntie.

Chirrut gently removes the auntie’s fingers from her forehead.

A Twi’lek approaches the shrine next to their table, clasps her hands together and bows her head. She leaves satchets of spice and potpourri and a small cluster of longan marked with runes in gold paint, as an offering. Then she picks up a stick with a mounted censer and blesses the figurine in the shrine. Smoke wreaths the figurine.

Her prayers finished, she moves next to Chirrut, her eyes fixed on the auntie. A customer.

The auntie waves at Chirrut, dismissing her. The Twi’lek takes her seat when she gets up to go.

“You go look after my Baze,” the auntie says. “You go tell that girl, she want to pray, she can pray at home with her family sometimes. Tell her there are gods all over the city and she can pray anywhere. Tell her don't forget her mothers.”

“Anything else?” Chirrut smiles.

“Then you go kiss her already, what else!”

Chirrut bursts out laughing. “That's in my fortune, is it?”

“Aiyoh, Auntie not even Jedi, Auntie also know.”

The auntie powers up her holopad and the abacus clicks to life. The Twi’lek pushes a pile of credits across the table.

“I have prayed,” says the Twi’lek. “I have asked for intercession and made the offering.”

“Good,” says the auntie. “Now I test you.”

The numbers and sigils spin and swap on the screen.

Chirrut pauses at the shrine. The clay figurine is a woman - a beautiful woman with dark skin and a wide body, a round face and a prim, tiny dot for a mouth. The script on the border of the shrine reads: _The God of Small Mercies and Liminal Space_. On her head, a headdress cut into the shape of a guk fa flower, a corona of petalled chaos. A lightsaber in her left hand, and in her right a roll of cloth, written with the verses of a sutta. Chirrut leaves two of the mantau on an offertory dish before the God. The third bun, she brings back to the Temple for Baze.

 

***

 

Zama-shiwo, when Chirrut first started learning, turned out to be the art of doing nothing.

“No wonder you're so good at it man,” Baze told her.

In response, Chirrut nudged Baze somewhat more forcefully than necessary.

Baze rubbed her shoulder, glaring at her. It will bruise tonight. Chirrut smirked right back.

“Well it's true what.” Baze shrugged and shoved Chirrut away before she could hit out again.

During the first session of zama-shiwo, Ilzah-sifu instructed the four selected novices to “let the Force of Others move through them”.

In other words, close their eyes and do nothing. Not even the slowest or easiest of forms.

“To know movement, you must know your environment down to the interstitial level, how to move through all levels of your environment. To know your environment, submit to it. Listen. Be aware. You must learn stasis. Stasis is not just the absence of movement, but a form by itself, a form of submission to your environment. The first of the forms that you must master,” Ilzah-sifu said. The end of their staff nudged Chirrut's elbow upwards. “Hold your angle, Imwe-novice.”

The four novices learning zama-shiwo - Chirrut, Danang and two others named Khartik and Teratai, - were made to hold their poses for three hours. After that, Ilzah-sifu dismissed them.

The next day, the novices did the same. And the day after that. And after that.

In fact, that was all they did for the first month of learning zama-shiwo.

Baze mocked her aching neck and shoulders. “Didn't know doing nothing was such hard work.”

Chirrut tossed her a small bottle of siang pure red medicated oil. She pulled down her robes, exposing her shoulders and grimaced. "Rub for me."

During the second month of learning zama-shiwo, Ilzah-sifu made the four novices stand on one leg. Danang Sinmukh struggled with this, because of the lek stump on the right side of his head, which already affected his balance.

During the third month of learning, Ilzah-sifu balanced jars on their heads. One-legged, eyes shut, hands held together. They broke a lot of jars during that month.

“Next you'll be asked to balance a brazier on top of that jar on your head,” Baze said. Needless to say, she found this all very amusing. “I'll burn incense for your tortured spirit.”

During the fourth month of zama-shiwo, Ilzah-sifu began hitting the novices with their staff. Chirrut was caught unawares when she was holding the usual stupid pose, crane-legged, forearms parallel to the ground, and a pear-shaped jar on her head. When she stayed so still like this, the kyber sounds were a nuisance in her head, a swarm of gnats biting at the edges of her consciousness.

It was then that Ilzah-sifu slammed the butt of their staff into her stomach and she doubled over, the air whacked out of her lungs and the jar fell off her head and shattered.

She wheezed. “Sifu, you do that for what?”

“I told you to hold your form,” said Ilzah-sifu, glaring down at her.

“How am I supposed to do that when you just go wallop me for no reason?”

Ilzah-sifu was not impressed with her answer. “Do not ask _how_. _How_ is the answer to everything and if I gave you that so easily, you still will not understand.”

_Try me_ , she didn’t say.

She resumed her stance. Only to be slammed to the ground by their staff again. Danang Sinmukh sniggered. Ilzah-sifu flicked their staff sharply in his direction, and _he_ went down to the ground.

“When I tell you to stay still, I don't mean daydream,” said Ilzah-sifu sternly. “Be mindful of your surroundings. Your surroundings will tell you when you to expect an attack, when to brace. Be aware. Awareness within your body. Awareness beyond your body. Experienced practitioners of zama-shiwo can regulate their internal functions to align with their physical environment, to become extensions of their environment, to move through the interstices of time and space within their localised environment.”

"I'm in pain," said Chirrut sourly. The three other novices were all on the ground as well, groaning and rubbing at their bruises.

"Sometimes I find that I'm not good enough as a teacher," Ilzah-sifu answered. "So I let your own bodies teach you. Pain is an excellent instructor. Discomfort in the body is a teacher of awareness, of your physical limitations, how these can be stretched."

Later, while massaging the mentholated oil into Chirrut’s neck, Baze offered to help her practice zama-shiwo. “I can help you train. You stand on one leg and I hit you.”

Chirrut scowled. “You get lost.”

 

***

 

“I'm going out to train,” Chirrut tells Baze one evening.

Baze folds away the robes she’d been mending. “Okay wait for me.”

“Eh no need lah,” Chirrut says. “I malas to train with you.”

Baze directs an appraising look at her. “Fine. You want your space, is it.”

“Don't be so sensitive like that,” Chirrut snaps. “Anyway, Ilzah-sifu said I have to do extra practice.”

She does not often push Baze away, or lie outright to her. This small falsehood is a fishbone lodged in the soft parts of her throat. She swallows the stab of guilt.

She has to turn her head slightly when she talks to Baze, so she can look at Baze using her peripheral vision. Otherwise Baze will be fuzzy, a ghost, visual static.

(To never see Baze again is something she refuses to contemplate)

Chirrut goes out into the training yard, grabbing a practice staff on the way out. She tries the basic forms of zama-shiwo, starting with stasis and distracted meditation, and then the slower forms. The kyber notes clash in her head, insistent, infuriating.

The Force does not move Chirrut in any way, never has. It does not channel through her opaque unspecial body; it does not propel her from form to form. Instead, her motions are careful mimicry of Ilzah-sifu’s movements rather than any natural affinity with the Force.

Does this, then, make her a false practitioner? Faithless. The veins of a sceptic are hollow. The faithless heart is a cracked jar that retains nothing.

_To live without conviction, to abide by all that is hollow. To believe that emptiness is emptiness._

“In these jars,” Guardian Douma told the novices years ago, gesturing to the huge sculptures in the courtyard, “are held the wisdom of the Whills. Or so we’ve been told. Why, then, are they empty?”

The kyber spikes into a discordant crescendo. Jagged wavelengths of sound. She has never been to the kyber chambers, but she imagines that the crystals would look like florets of spiny corals, zig-zagging along the bedrock like subterranean lightning. Glowing, notched tumours of the earth.

“Training hard?” Baze says, deliberately bumping into her, so she is jolted out of her careful stance.

Chirrut glares at her, disoriented. Baze is all shabby lines, a tall shadow in the evening gloom. “Advanced zama-shiwo stuff. Until you disturb.”

“Ya hor. Really advanced. I was watching you.” Baze's words are soaked with sarcasm. “Come on, let's go in already. It's freezing.”

“If you don't mind, I want to stay out here for a bit more.”

“If you don't mind,” Baze echoes, “--what, you think I'm giving you a fucking choice is it? Didn't you hear the gong calling everyone inside? Got sandstorm coming.”

Chirrut ignores the urgency in Baze's voice. “Actually. Do me a favour and get yourself a staff. Practice with me awhile.”

“You're joking,” Baze snarls.

“Not joking lah.”

“Do I have to carry you in? Because I will if I have to.”

“Little while. Five minutes. The storm won't hit so fast.” Chirrut adopts her most cajoling tone.

Baze snorts and relents, as she always does when it comes to Chirrut. She stalks off the training yard and returns with a practice staff.

“Thought you said you don't want me to train with you.”

Chirrut doesn't reply. They touch the tips of their staffs together and bow. A few moments of courtesy pass. The wind kicks up eddies of sand around their feet.

Chirrut strikes first. She never goes first, because patience has always been a major principle of zama-shiwo. Baze deflects easily. She steps aside, out of the arc of Chirrut's next blow, feints to the left and swings toward Chirrut's legs.

Chirrut hears, rather than sees, the downward swish of the staff, and skips away. Baze is a blur of motion through her poor eyesight, and she is forced to expend more energy and time calculating her own movements and estimating Baze’s next moves. She lands a blow on Baze's exposed back and Baze swears, but it's not a blow that bothers her too much, because she retaliates, forcing Chirrut to retreat again.

“You don't have to go so easy on me,” says Baze, exhilaration making her breathless. “I'm faster than you think.”

Chirrut snaps her staff down and raps Baze on the ankles. “Wah so fast ah, leng lui.”

Baze grunts, side-steps and moves a few feet back. She is moving fast, much too fast for Chirrut. Either that, or Chirrut has slowed down. She _does_ feel slower. Sluggish. Her limbs slopping around. Like air has become a dead weight, sitting on every inch of her body surface. Like the world is clinging to her, moored at the crooks of her elbows and knees and feet, dragging her backward.

And the kyber. If she could only shut up the kyber. The noise shrieking through her skull.

Baze starts toward her again, her mouth a tight slash, but with a question in her eyes. Chirrut tries to deflect but her staff hits nothing, because Baze has whirled away, feinted.

The butt of Baze's staff connects with Chirrut's throat. The force and the unexpectedness of the blow sends her to the ground, gagging.

“Fuck.” Baze drops to the ground beside her. “Sorry, sorry, sorry. I thought you were going to block that. Are you---?”

Chirrut holds up a hand. She rubs at her throat, wincing. White stars flash across her eyes, the kyber a ragged squeal in her head. Her pulse gathers momentum in her temples.

“Not. Done.Yet,” Chirrut rasps, attempting to pull herself up. “Another round. I lost concentration.”

“And all common sense as well, by the sound of it.” Baze runs her knuckles along the sides of Chirrut’s neck, then pulls back, as if breaching some unmarked boundary. She pulls Chirrut up. Or tries to.

“I said another.”

Baze growls, “You’re hurt already. And didn’t I say I’ll carry you in if I have to?”

“You can try.” Chirrut’s voice is heavy with menace and indignation.

“Fine. Whatever.” Baze crouches and with all her strength, tries to hoist Chirrut onto her back.

Chirrut shrieks and struggles wildly, slipping out of Baze’s iron grip. Digs her nails and then her fingers into the dirt, pressing all her weight into the ground. An outburst of wind gusts across the yard, sweeping sand into their faces. The sweat on Chirrut’s skin sharpens into little icy beads.

“Let go!” Baze shouts. “You want us to get blown away by the storm is it?”

“Sei bat po, you let go lah!” Chirrut shouts back. “You want to go in, you go in yourself!”

Baze laughs, a hard bark of a laugh. She grabs Chirrut’s ankles and manages to drag Chirrut a few feet. Chirrut's fingers rake trails in the earth. Some of the dirt gets between her teeth. Bitter. She spits.

So Baze wants to be like this? Fine. Chirrut can get rough and dirty, too. With all her strength, she pushes her arms off the ground and jabs her legs forward, her ankles breaking free from Baze's grip, and her feet plant themselves into Baze's stomach, knocking the wind out of her. And before Baze can recover, she swings her now free foot into the back of Baze's knee, twisting her body, eel-like, bringing Baze to the ground.

It's Chirrut's turn to laugh.

They wrestle, tangled up, legs and arms thrashing, shrieking. A dishonourable fight, all the sifu would agree. They grab at each other's heads but neither have sufficient hair for the other to tug on. Until Chirrut catches Baze's left ear and pulls it hard and Baze yells in rage.

“What the fucking fuck,” says Danang Sinmukh from the edge of the yard, “are you two doing down there in the dirt?”

“Eating it!” Baze shouts. “Why you don't come join us, huh?”

Danang snorts his irritation and goes back inside. Chirrut turns to look at Baze beside her. Baze looks back. They start to laugh.

“I'm going blind,” Chirrut says.

“ _No_. Don’t say that. We’ll find a way to cure you. We're going to leave Jedha, right? You just tell me when you want to go--I can borrow from my family. Any time.”

“I don't know how to fight anymore. I'm useless.”

Baze scoffs. “You mean just now? Hah. I thought that was all my skill.”

“Please lah. Actually I give chance only.”

The wind has now increased in volume and the air is thick with grit. In the dark stretch of desert beyond the mesa, pin-bright flickers of lightning. The storm will reach Jedha City any moment now, funnelling through the streets and ripping off slates and awnings and antennae, knocking the caps off comm towers, snuffing out generators.

“Last chance to come in,” Danang shouts from inside the Temple. Cell lighting blares white and ghostly from the interior of the building. “Before I seal all the doors.”

“Please,” says Baze. There really is a plea in her voice. Something Chirrut has never heard before. “Don’t fight me.”

Chirrut puts her hand through Baze’s. Their fingers twine and lock. Baze's breathing is rough, knotted with uncertainty and discomfort. She leans forward and ghosts her lips against Baze's cheek. Baze freezes. Then carries on as if nothing happened.

Baze carries her on her back, across the yard. Her arms around Baze's neck. Her mouth pressing against Baze's shaven head. The kyber crystals are drowned out by the sound of Baze's pulse.

 

***

 

This is the third precept of the Guardians: _do not be overcome by attachment. To other beings, sentient or not, to places, to material objects._

Baze wakes early one morning. She wanders toward the meditation room but changes her mind and goes to the library instead. The door slides open. None of the librarians are there, only a very old archivist droid behind the counter, plugged into its charge pod.

The droid’s optical lenses light up when Baze triggers off its motion sensors. “Novice Malbus, you are up early. How may I be of assistance?”

“No need.” Baze settles in on one of the search pods and brings up a holographic display.

She swerves through data aimlessly, until the third precept pops up, glowing. The words in three dimensions, a spectral visual mantra. Below that, the expounded text swarms and curves into a wall around her head. She reads and reads and her brain understands less and less, until all she can do is pick out individual words, catching them like coins rolling downhill. Sense drops away rapidly.

Baze closes down the holographic display.

She knows all the precepts by heart anyway.

_Do not be overcome by attachment._ The Guardians of the Whills are not the Jedi. The Jedi cling to their edicts with strict obedience, with austere dedication to the Force. Doubt is a path to the Dark Side, according to Jedi teachings.

But the Guardians teach understanding through questioning, through constant discourse, which form the ever-expanding appendices of the Whills Canon. The truth must be questioned so that their teachings never stagnate, so the Guardians do not become complacent.

The result is always the same, though.

All discourse of the Guardians, in the end, point to the same answer: an affirmation of faith in the Force. In the way of the Guardians. And the Force is eternal.

So the circular reasoning continues. Sometimes, it’s hard to blame sceptics like Chirrut. Faith can be such an exclusionary circle.

Attachment, however. Attachment is a different thing altogether. It never really troubled her in the past--hadn’t she given up the comforts of home and family, and taken up the path of a future Guardian?

And yet there is a reason why the third precept is bothering her; there must be. And how it has anything to do with Chirrut Imwe.

She doesn't want to meditate on this. _Don’t join the dots._ A worm of shame eats a hole through her thoughts.

She leaves the library and goes outside. Scales the high Temple wall and sits cross-legged on the top, facing the city. This is usually Chirrut's space, but Chirrut does not come here so often anymore.

These days Chirrut is morose, uncommunicative and there's not a lot that Baze can say that will lift her mood. She knows Chirrut well enough to know when she makes light of matters that trouble her, and right now, it’s definitely her deteriorating eyesight. Chirrut won’t leave Jedha, though. She deflects and delays and sometimes just plain ignores Baze’s many suggestions. Stubborn girl.

Baze tries to meditate here, at the top of the Temple wall, but Jedha is awash with morning sounds, the bustle radiating outward from the Central District.

“Thanks for keeping my spot warm for me.” Chirrut vaults easily up the wall and squats next to Baze. Her smile is radiant. “But now I’m here, you can move over.”

Baze is sitting in a patch of sunlight, the warmest part of the wall, a spot clearly coveted by Chirrut. “Damn brave ah you. But don’t forget I’m bigger and tougher than you.”

“You forgot older,” Chirrut says.

“So. Respect your elders.”

Below them, a vendor wheels a cart of fresh steamed cakes along Vatta Street and stops by the Temple wall, directly below them. The smell of rich syrup and hot starch wafts upward. Soon, the gates of the Temple will be opened, and the usual devotees will come in for prayers and to bring food offerings to the Guardians, and she and Chirrut really shouldn’t be here, idling away the morning when there’s so much to be done.

“You hungry? I’ll get you something if you want.” Chirrut gestures down the wall, where the cake seller is.

“We should go in,” Baze replies.

Sunlight spreads across the city, flooding the Temple compound with misty, filtered light. The sun of the Jedha system is weak, primeval, a perishing star that offers little heat to its orbiting planets and their satellites. Still, Chirrut turns her back to the angle of sunshine and to the city. She blinks, too hard and too often, before closing her eyes completely.

“You need to see Guardian Thanh for more of those optic drops?”

“No,” Chirrut says, curtly.

They sit in silence for awhile. Speeders buzz through the streets. More vendors appear, congregating along the Temple walls. Some selling breakfast food. Hot custard. Fried buns. Others selling charms, souvenirs. The Temple becomes quite the centre of commerce, though merchants are not allowed to sell their wares within the compound.

“You remember the oasis, all those years ago?” Baze breaks the moment of tranquillity first.

“Khaokhun Oasis.” Chirrut nods. “Why?”

“I never thanked you. For saving me. For pulling me out of the water and doing your shitty resuscitation technique thing on me.”

“It worked what.” Chirrut shrugs. “And you’re welcome.” Her forehead creases into a frown. “But it was my fault in the first place.”

“Eh,” Baze grumbles, “you’re not my keeper. Or my protector.”

“Baze,” says Chirrut. “What would _you_ do to save someone’s life?”

“Depends whose life.”

“So sensible.” Chirrut shuffles backward, brings her knees to her chin, so she’s perched right on the edge of the wall. “I mean, if you are given the chance and the choice to save someone--doesn’t matter whether you know or like them or not--would you?”

Baze goes tense. She draws a slow breath. Chirrut is looking ahead, unsmiling. Almost grim. Her gaze, arrow-sharp and undeterred.

“Oi. Now what are you doing?”

“Nothing lah,” says Chirrut. Then she leans backward into air. Her curled- up body seems to freeze in that angle of fall before tipping downward. The Temple wall is high.

And Baze starts to life. She seizes Chirrut’s arm with one hand, and the collar of Chirrut’s robe with the other. Her fingers dig too hard into Chirrut’s flesh. There will be bruises but it’s all Chirrut’s fault because what the fuck, stupid crazy girl, she want to suicide by splitting her fucking brainless kepala open on the ground is it?

She manages to haul Chirrut back onto the wall, holds onto her tightly, stabilises them both.

Her heart is angry thunder in her mouth. She can only choke out one word. “ _Explain_.”

“Congratulations.” Chirrut is smiling again. “You saved a life.”

All the things she could yell at Chirrut. All the futile things.

But all Baze manages to say is: “You made me save your life?”

“Actually no.” Chirrut smirks. “I would have just flipped around and landed on my feet. But that cake seller uncle down below us, on the other hand, would have been crushed to death if you didn’t stop me. So _he_ owes you one.”

And then Chirrut leans forward and kisses Baze.

“Ma lai gou!” calls the cake seller uncle below them, oblivious to the goings-on above his head.

 

***

 

Chirrut kisses Baze’s top lip, then her bottom lip, then the corners of her mouth, then the crinkles of the frown on Baze’s forehead. A slow exploration of Baze’s face.

Baze keeps wanting to talk, to discuss, to fret about random things, possibly put everything down in paper, then in duplicate, triplicate, coded into data, archived, et cetera, blah blah whatever lah so Chirrut kisses her mouth again to delay her.

“You sure someone’s not going to just walk in on us like this?” Baze breaks away, distracted.

They’re in a small room in the basement of the Temple, usually frequented by maintenance or cleaner droids, surrounded by the hum and the emitted warmth of the generator network. Power cables bracketed into place stretch from circuit boards and disappear into the stonework. Baze’s face is greasy in the slick glow of the service lighting.

“Sure,” Chirrut says, “unless Venerable Master Sameshtra comes down here of course.”

“And why would the Venerable come down to the generator room? Shouldn’t she be meditating on the mysteries of the Force or something?”

“She comes down here all the time. To check the circuit boards. I’ve also seen her reprogramming access codes or scrubbing the benches in the clay gardens. Everyone also got see her what. You all just don’t know it’s her because usually she always in her niqab.”

Baze takes a moment to process this information.

“Most novices don’t know the things you know about the Temple. _I_ don’t even know half the things you’re aware of.”

Chirrut shrugs. “Maybe I don’t pay attention enough to lessons. Maybe my attention is always outside, always in the wrong place. Whatever. You know what Guardian Tallah says about me.”

Baze opens her mouth to say more, but Chirrut slides her hands along the curve of her neck, weaving her fingers together at the back of Baze’s head. She pulls Baze closer to her, so close that Baze is pressing her into the cool stone wall. She kisses the point of Baze’s chin.

“Are we going to discuss what we’re doing?”

“Of course. After you stop talking.”

“Doesn’t make sense.”

Chirrut puts a thumb on Baze’s lip, and her other thumb on her own lip. She applies pressure to Baze’s lip, and in response, Baze moves her head backwards, so Chirrut can study her in the dim lighting of the basement room.

She has known Baze for years now, seen her change, even before she understood why and how she could observe someone so closely, with so much curiosity. And now, looking at Baze’s face, Chirrut sees and comprehends not a static image but a progression of all the years that she’s known Baze. She remembers the features that have moved, lengthened, trenched, the bones that have started to show, the veins that have begun to assert themselves through her dark skin. And now with her memory she charts the tiny corrugations in Baze’s forehead when she frowns, the raised vein on her left temple. She knows Baze’s broad nose, the ledges of cheekbones continually growing out of sync with each other, breaking away from the line that could be drawn across her face, the double eyelids and their upward inflections. The asymmetry of Baze. And the ears that Baze tries to ignore every day. Who can ignore them, though? Their disproportion. The way they displace her attention every time she looks at Baze, and also the way they perfectly parenthesise that familiar micro-landscape of Baze’s face, which Chirrut now holds between her hands.

Chirrut moves her thumb downward, pulling Baze’s lower lip with it. Revealing pale gums, teeth that are not straight. In a moment of self-consciousness, Baze flicks her offending thumb away.

“You are the reason,” Chirrut says, “that I am still here.”

This time Baze kisses her. A gong sounds in the main hall of the Temple.

“You go,” says Chirrut. “I’ll follow.”

 

***

 

They meet again at night, after sunset prayers, after evening meditation and the last of the chores, after lights out, in the innermost cell of the shower facility next to the dormitory they’ve slept in for years now.

It must be past midnight, but time is hard to measure when Baze is tugging at the collar of Chirrut’s nightshirt, trying to unloose a sliver of her pale throat. Chirrut gasps, an unguarded sound.

Baze runs her mouth along the strip of exposed neck, breathing in the scent of Chirrut’s skin, the smell of warmth, carbolic soap, and the whiff of mentholated oil Baze herself had applied earlier.

Chirrut is tugging at Baze's own shirt, the material rucking in her fist, and under Baze's arms and off her shoulder. Chirrut is strong but so is Baze. She drives Chirrut against the wall. She pins Chirrut's wrists against the stone.

Their hands slide together, rough-knuckled, veined, callused from years of training and chores. And familiar, the shapes of each other's hands. So familiar, yet they've never actually touched in this way before.

Chirrut tips her head back, mouth half-open. Speechless for once.

There are boundaries that Baze is straddling. She can feel them in the moment, in the wire-tense breaths strung between them both, in her heartbeat, so fast that it feels less like a rhythm and more of a tiny frenzied planet spinning and trapped in its collapsing axis. There is a precept for now. Always is. There are discourses on the nature of attachment within the Guardians; there are arguments for and against. There are revisions and appendices to the practises of the Guardians, and there are annotations upon annotations, and they all tie back to the will of the Force.

She rummages through her mind for lessons, quotes, lectures, but every word and every concept becomes smoke, yielding only to the substantial. And all that is substance, all that is present is Chirrut.

Chirrut closes her eyes and smiles.

Baze nips at the intersection of Chirrut's half-exposed collarbones. The soft parts of her throat.

A rush of water drenches them both. Chirrut has switched on the shower.

“The _kriffing_ hell?” Baze starts to yell but Chirrut shuts her up by slamming her mouth onto Baze's. Teeth click together, sending painful tremors through both their jaws.

“Afterwards you wake up the whole Temple then only you know,” Chirrut hisses against the side of Baze's mouth. Her breathlessness sends heat curling through Baze.

“Do I have to ask, or will you explain?”

“You know lah,” Chirrut says. “Anyone come in they'll just think someone is taking shower.”

“Midnight got people shower meh?”

“Haiyo they're not going to come in and investigate, okay? And if they do, we'll just have to make it up as it goes.”

Baze swallows. “I don't know what I'm doing. Just so you know.”

“I don't care,” says Chirrut. Then: “I also don't know.”

“But--,”

“Just stop talking already.”

Chirrut laughs. Steam from the water rises off her flushed skin. Baze takes a handful of Chirrut's soaked shirt and slowly pulls it over her head. The material is sticky with water and it peels off Chirrut's body reluctantly.

At some point Baze remembers kissing Chirrut down past her neck, her hands running the length of Chirrut's sides, exploring her small breasts, rib cage, hips. The tip of her tongue grazes Chirrut's protruding nipple, making Chirrut arch her back against the wall. Chirrut pushes against her and she pushes back.

They've definitely exhibited more grace and restraint in their sparring sessions together.

At some point she peels off her own sodden nightshirt. It drops to the ground with a wet thwack.

Chirrut frees herself and pushes Baze against the wall, so now their positions are swapped. She drops to her knees. Baze watches, bemused. Chirrut slides her hands upwards, along Baze's calves, the backs of her knees, thighs, following the hard smooth pathways of her toned musculature. She kisses the inner thighs, kisses her way up. She uses her body to wedge Baze's legs further apart and Baze can only comply, giving Chirrut all the access to her body.

Chirrut slips a finger through the folds of skin and flesh, rubs a slow circle between her legs. Then the point of her tongue, tentative at first as she adjusts the angle of her head. More pressure, as she works her lips to create suction, as her tongue gains momentum. Baze fumbles for a handhold, her fingernails scraping into the wall. Chirrut breaks away, stretches her hands upward to take hold of Baze's breasts, tease and tweak at her nipples and Baze very nearly sobs at the confusion of her body, the multiple points of stimulation.

She'll have to look down soon.

Chirrut pushes a finger inside her. Two fingers. Baze is slick, aching. Chirrut's fingers probe, curling until she hits a spot that elicits a spasm of pleasure out of Baze. Baze grinds against Chirrut's hand, jerking gracelessly, pushing her weight into Chirrut's touch. Chirrut slips a third finger in.

“Baze,” says Chirrut, breathing her name against Baze's crotch.

Baze moans in reply, thinks about asking her to stop, except she doesn't really want her to stop, no. Her hands caress the back of Chirrut's head. Feels the furze of Chirrut's hair, growing out. Needs trimming.

She looks down. Chirrut returns her gaze with a lazy smile. Chirrut is beautiful, dark eyes glinting, long wet eyelashes clumped together.

All the Chirruts she has ever known, all the Chirruts she has ever tussled with, shouted at, cursed at, laughed with, facepalmed over, and yes, subconsciously lusted over, now merge and solidify into the Chirrut before her now, on her knees.

When Baze comes, she jolts hard against Chirrut's mouth and fingers, hearing Chirrut's laugh veiled by the sound of water.

Let the whole Temple wake up; Baze Malbus doesn't care.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (...this has to be the most rambling messiest longest chapter ever...)
> 
> but thank you for reading! :)


	3. III

**III.**

 

The kyber goes dead one day in Chirrut’s ears. It happens when she's at the questionable underground medical facility, getting another of those eye-shots.

Her nerves have been dulled, but she still feels the perforation, the sharp dip and draw of the needle through the jelly of her anaesthetised eyeball. After the procedure, she remains in the corner of the cellar facility, cold pads against her eyelids. There is a strange imbalance in her skull, but she doesn't recognise what it is, not with the buzz and the pounding of the souk above.

Only when she returns to the Temple, does she realise that she can’t hear the kyber crystals. This is new. For most of her life, she has heard them in all their irritating variations, and now their absence unfurls into thick fronds of silence in her ears.

It unnerves her at first, but she gets used to it. Chirrut has never held much faith in the Force, anyway.

 

 

*******

 

 

“Your heart is not here,” says Ilzah-sifu. “Go inside. And come back tomorrow when you’re ready to train seriously.”

Chirrut swipes sweat from her brow and fights the urge to spit.

Ilzah-sifu has knocked her to the ground for the fourth time in a row. She hasn’t lasted more than fifteen seconds each time.

“I’ll try again. I want to keep training.”

“In that case, drop your staff,” says Ilzah-sifu. “Practice the basics on your own. And this time, don't do them mindlessly.”

“The last few weeks you made me do nothing but basics.” Chirrut clenches her teeth. Brilliant white spots blink in her vision. The shots through her eyes are becoming less and less effective.

“And you will continue to do so for now. Sometimes, to progress, you need to retrace your steps. Find the point where you have gone off-balance and recalibrate. Zama-shiwo is not so much about one’s physical abilities as it is about belief. You cannot separate the practice of zama-shiwo from faith in the Force.”

“Sometimes I don’t know how anyone can understand what you’re talking.” The words fly out of her mouth before she can bite them down.

Ilzah-sifu moves their staff very quickly. The pressure of the wood on her left shoulder is a warning.

“If you want to learn,” they say, coldly, “stop talking back. Otherwise, you’re free to leave.”

They pull away and gesture to the other novices to continue.

Chirrut throws her staff down and stalks off the yard.

 

***

 

There is a story of a monk who set out into the desert and found nothing. The badlands writhed with electrical winds and squalls of grit. To make something out of nothing: that is what everyone who sets foot in the desert seeks to do, is that not?

In the eye of the storm, which is the eye of the desert,  the monk communed with nothing, and it was the will of the Force that ze should not leave the desert with nothing. Ze caught a razor-sharp, white-hot flake of lightning with zir eye, and ze was blinded.

Chirrut mostly made the story up, to Baze. It’s a remix of an old myth, practically an urban legend she’d first heard at the orphanage.

“That,” said Baze, seriously, “is a story about your serious lack of faith, wei.”

“Story is just story lah.”

Chirrut’s vision flashes gold and silver one night, like the monk’s eyes.

She’s sitting on Baze’s bed, cross-legged, Baze asleep with her head on Chirrut’s lap.

There is no light around them. Only in her eyes, filling up, illuminated from the inside. No sound in her ears either. The kyber crystals are dead to her. She is dead to the Force.

The other novices in the dormitory breathe around her, locked in the deep cadence of their sleep. As far as she knows, she’s alone. Another streak of light rips across her eyesight.

Chirrut tightens her grip on Baze's shoulder. Baze mumbles, her head rolling off Chirrut's lap. Don't wake Baze. Let her sleep. This isn't Baze's problem.

_Get up and go._

Her own voice in her head: _get up and go._ But go where? She can hardly see now. The darkness of the room is slivered, its edges shredding away into harsh silver.

Chirrut stumbles out of bed, out of the dormitory, her eyes full of skewers. Nobody stops her. There should be Guardians out here but she runs into no one.

She stops in the central hall of the Temple, the space directly beneath the Spire. The hall is bare, the peak of its ceiling tapering off into space. There are no gods to kneel before or beg mercy from. The Guardians of the Whills do not use images of deities, or sentients of any sort, unlike some of the other religions of Jedha. Jedha City is full of the faces of gods and divinities and local and galactic saints, dwelling in small streetside shrines or in the mosaics of murals, their names embossed onto protection banners hung above doorways and strung between pillars.

But not here, not in the Temple of the Kyber. There is no image of the Force, nothing solid that anyone can latch themselves to or derive comfort from, no body to the chants and the mantras.

_Faith is a temple that you heave into existence, one rock at a time. The images are yours to make. The architecture is yours to create. You hold it up yourself._

_So get up and go._

Chirrut falls to her knees. Feels the press of the hard ground beneath her.

She knows the words.

_So say them_.

But Chirrut is stubborn. The prayers won’t touch her lips.

Instead she says, “I’m Chirrut Imwe.”

_These are not the words_.

In the Force, there is self-effacement. Death of self. What would it mean for her, Chirrut Imwe, the girl with no origins, the girl whom the disciples at the orphanage had to make room for, the girl who hears the kyber crystals but does not understand, the girl without faith? What does it mean to die again to Chirrut Imwe, who was dead before she was even born?

She wants to shout: _What else is there? What is there that I can’t see? Or hear?_

Her own voice in answer: _So many years you’ve been like this. And now only you ask why? Start with the facts_.

“I’m Chirrut Imwe,” she says. A fact. The Force _will not_ change this.

“I’m going blind.” Another fact.

She breathes, beads of sweat rising through her skin, metal-cold. Another flash. The world tears up, comet-bright, collapsing. Her tears are sharp like sparks.

“I'm Chirrut Imwe. I'm going blind. Is that what you want to hear?” The accusation in her words swerves around the empty hall, spinning back to her, the one to be blamed.

_Chirrut, you know the words!_

She starts. It's no longer just her own weak voice in her head, but there's an echo shadowing her words, giving them weight and volume, and it's Baze's voice. She must be dreaming, and yet Baze’s voice is so clear, so real. It's Baze calling to her in anger, _Chirrut, you fool,_ _say the words and ask for help for once you think you're so fucking clever is it!_

Baze's voice. Baze’s anger. Just the whole thought of Baze herself. Chirrut does not understand the Force, may never fully comprehend it, but Baze she knows. Baze she can hold on to. The Force has no image or physical trace. But Baze has a face, and Baze has a body, and Baze has a pattern, a signature in the Force, and Baze is overflowing with strength that Chirrut lacks. And Baze is handing her all her mountainous strength now, pulling her up from the ground, threatening to carry her if she won't get up, even drag her, like she once dragged Chirrut across the dirt of the training yard.

The words come to her.

“I fear nothing. All is as the Force wills.”

_You say it again._

“I fear nothing. All is as the Force wills.”

These are words that she will repeat to the end of her life. The thought strikes her, and for the most threadbare of moments, she feels tricked, defeated.

Then, the silence gives way to a singular note in her ears, a sound so pristine that she closes her eyes to the violent play of light across her vision. All her concentration is focused on that note, which expands, gathers weight and depth, filling the interstitial space between her thoughts. The note shimmers through her, splits and multiplies, folding her into the flawless patterns of its sound.

This is the sound of the kyber, but she has never heard them this way before. The kyber crystals are no longer random surges of sound, shrieking through her skull. There are pulses now, blooming and wilting in her head, a kind of language, and the language calls a response out of her.

Chirrut rises from the floor. Baze is not here. Baze is asleep in bed.

There isn’t a word for this; it feels like the movement of some greater current directing her limbs, gently lifting each sole of her foot and placing it down again. She is conscious, her consciousness sharpened to the point of tenderness, of every step her body takes. Of every breath of air that passes through her lungs. She is aware of the interconnected fluxes of her body, the valves of her heart opening and closing, the arch and slack of her muscles, the hairline map of nerves spread beneath skin, the awareness of awareness of awareness. Her breathing takes up the rhythms of zama-shiwo. The ground is insubstantial beneath her feet, and she feels as pliable as the air around her.

Chirrut leaves the central hall. Doors slide open before her; access codes leap off the ends of her fingers.

She enters an area usually off-limits to novices. Even during her many explorations of the Temple, Chirrut has never ventured here before. But this is the way to the language. This is the way to the kyber crystals.

 

***

 

The first day Chirrut goes missing, Baze isn’t _too_ worried. Instead, she feels a surly twist of resentment at the idea of Chirrut going off without even telling her where. She snaps at everyone who talks to her, until Guardian Tallah assigns her to cleaning all the grimy heating coils of the Temple.

Chirrut hadn’t slept in her bed the whole night at all. (That’s because she’d been sitting in Baze’s bed, every now and then flicking a thumb at Baze’s lip or nose, until Baze got tired of her and laid her head down on Chirrut’s lap, and went to sleep). And in the morning, she’s gone.

The second day, the Guardians search for Chirrut in the Temple grounds and the surrounding neighbourhood, along Vatta Street but nobody has seen her.

“She could have left for good,” Guardian Tallah says. “Novices are free to leave when they want to, if they have somewhere to go. And Novice Imwe is not a child any longer.”

“She won’t just go like that,” Baze snarls, not caring to be polite. _I know her better than you ever will_ , she does not add.

Dread cleaves to her all day, like a wet sheet. She can only keep her gaze straight, afraid to turn her head, and with her peripheral vision catch nothing, the gut-wrenching absence of Chirrut.

What if Chirrut really had left without telling her? Is she capable of that? How much does she actually know about Chirrut?

The last question leaves a sour taste in her mouth.

The third night Chirrut doesn’t come home, Baze falls to her knees on the flagstones of the Temple courtyard. Prayers, mantras, petitions and all manner of verbal excesses pour out of her.

_I have given you so much_ , she says to the Force. The Force is nobody and nothing, yet the Force is supposed to be not just alive, but living. Purposeful. _Please, I have given up everything. Let me find her_.

She isn’t praying in the way of the Guardians. The Guardians do not beg favours of the Force. In their times of need, they are supposed to look within themselves and see how to best align themselves with the will of the Force. Be prepared to accept the will of the Force. Not like her now: self-centred and accusing.

On the fifth day of Chirrut’s absence, Baze loses the last of her patience with the Force and leaves the Temple. The Guardians have searched for Chirrut in the city, but they must have missed her, because she _can’t_ have left, not just like that, not without telling Baze, right?

 

 

Jedha City is a sprawling deadlock of buildings and beings, antique speeders and other clanking transports, processions of chanting pilgrims, prayer flags strung from wires and crackling from the wind and from escaped electrical charges, ashes blowing from shrines, the polyphony of muezzins harmonising from different minarets. Archways, domes, courtyards, gated alleys, walls that sprout and then die off, concealing nothing, painted with ancient graffiti that have been pored over, holo-scanned and archived. Buildings that have grown layers over time. Some of the passageways through the crowded city are not the streets or alleys, but through the rooms or living spaces of residents.

But now, every shape of Jedha City, every block, every street, every intricate twist of architecture, is a bother to Baze. She would do away with the whole city if she could, lift it up like a toy, a clay model of a city patted into shape by a child’s hands, and turn it upside down, shake it until Chirrut, from whatever cranny she’s hiding in, tumbles out into Baze’s lap.

The central district stutters past Baze, a barely coherent dream. In Tythoni Square, a wedding has just concluded, all three newlyweds draped in spun gold. The souk is a fanfare of bright colour, but all the hawkers and tradespeople shake their heads at the image of Chirrut’s face, ghostly from the portable holoprojector Baze shows them. Chirrut is not here.

In Pousaat Quarter, where Chirrut’s old orphanage is, there are huge sandstone pillars towering over the buildings, engraved with vinelike script. They used to hold up the ceilings of vast hypostyle halls, but over aeons, the roofs have been eroded away, and the halls are now open-air. People have built dwellings and set up small shops between the pillars. Chirrut is not here in Pousaat Quarter, though.

In the New Market area: droid repair stations, speeder garages, water filtration centres, kyber crystal cutting workshops. Chirrut is not here either.

In the Mendut District, there are ablution pools and blessed fountains vapourising into the air. There are big stone bells that supposedly will ring only when there is perfect equilibrium in the Force. But no Chirrut.

In the end, Baze winds up in Amoy Quarter. Dusk is falling, the sky bruising over. Her feet are aching from trudging through the city. She catches the scents of the flower markets and dried herb shops of Amoy Quarter, and the familiarity makes her uneasy. Her feet pick up a remembered route and soon, she’s cutting through alleyways, vaulting over low gates, ascending ladders to rooftops and zig-zagging the roofways until she descends to street level again, and stops in front of a well-known compound.

It’s her old family home, of course, still there, the windows in the houses glowing with indoor warmth and comforts that she has long denied herself. How many years, she does not want to think. Everyone must be inside because the compound is deserted, and the thick oily smell of food in the fryer fills the air. Food she has not eaten in years.

She steps inside without realising what she’s doing.

“Girl ah, is that you?”

There is somebody outside after all. At the edge of the compound is the smallest house, little more than a two-room flat. By the door, a  woman on a bench. Smoking, sitting kiao kah, left ankle crossed over her right knee. When she was younger, Baze would never have been allowed to get away with this kind of behaviour, but this woman here is her second auntie, Li Ee, the crazy one, calculating fortunes with her crazy homemade programmes and (possibly) swindling customers with her crazy talk. She gets away with everything. No wonder Chirrut admires her so much.

Baze swallows. “It’s me.”

Li Ee blows a stream of smoke out from between her lips. “You finally come back to stay?”

She approaches Li Ee, who doesn’t move, except to suck at her cigarette, her sharp eyes never leaving Baze’s face. This is the only welcome Baze will get from her. “I can’t.”

Li Ee clucks her tongue. “Ceh, I thought you come back at last to help your mothers. Still so boh hau, ha?”

“It’s against Temple regulations. Ah-Mak and Ah-Bu know about the choices I made. And those choices still the same now.” Baze is defensive. She sits down next to Li Ee, stiff-backed, as defiant as possible.

“Huh. Regulations.” Li Ee taps ash off the end of her cigarette. “That is what your sick friend say last time. But I think she protecting you more than she mean it.”

“ _Chirrut_?” Hope surges hot and sudden through Baze. “You seen her today is it? I’m looking for her.”

“Eh, Temple can have cha bor peng iu but come back visit family cannot ah?”

“You seen her today or not?”

Li Ee seems to be deliberately ignoring her. She pretends to get up from her bench. “I make you something to drink.”

“No,” says Baze. “If you haven’t seen Chirrut then I’m going. I need to look for her.”

“Why you need to look for her? What if she don’t want you to find her, huh? Then what?”

Baze doesn’t have a reply to this. Her fear is becoming more and more tangible, but it also rouses a thrum of anger deep in her gut. “I’ll find her first, okay. And if she doesn’t want to see me, she can tell me to get lost. Let her tell me to my face.”

Li Ee laughs and laughs. When she stops, she clears her throat, uncrosses her legs and gets up. “You wait here.”

She goes inside her house. A few minutes passes, and she’s back out again.

“Give me your hand.”

Baze holds out her hand and Li Ee slips something around her wrist, beneath the sleeve. It’s a talisman of sort, a loop of braided string with a kyber crystal attached. Roughly cut, probably gouged out of a larger block by a crude homemade implement, its fingernail planes uneven. The crystal glows faintly, and against Baze’s wrist bone, there is the tiniest shiver.

“That girl can hear crystals one.” Li Ee knots the string at the back with her jointed fingers.

“I don’t see how this can help.” Baze touches the kyber talisman, rotates her wrist, trying to get used to the strange weight of it.

“She can hear you like this.”

Baze doesn’t understand. But she gets no other explanation.

“Want Li Ee to read your fortune?”

“No. That is not the way of the Force.” Baze’s answer is automatic, distracted. “I don’t believe that.”

“One day you won’t believe anything,” Li Ee scoffs. Her words aren’t even true, and yet they claw into Baze to settle in the cavity of her chest, small iron hooks of words, rusting there.

“Li Ee, I go first.”

“You talk like she’s not coming back.” Li Ee lights a new cigarette. “You go back to your Temple. Obviously your friend is not out here. And if she not here means she never go anywhere. So obvious.”

It is nearly dark now. Lamps start burning in the streets. There is the faint powdery scent of electrocuted moths.

Baze walks away from Li Ee’s house, heads back out into the street. She turns around to face her auntie. “How are Ah-Mak and Ah-Bu?”

Li Ee gestures roughly at one of the other houses in the compound. Baze hears the sounds of laughter and music from a holo-show, one of those melodramatic Alderaanian romances for sure.

“They’re just over there. You go ask them yourself. _If_ you can.”

But Baze can’t.

“I like your friend,” Li Ee calls to her. “Next time bring her back here.”

 

***

 

Baze enters the tiered gates of the Temple and the hairs on her arms straighten up. Awareness prickles all around her, an electrostatic fuzz that surges out of nowhere.

In the entrance hall, she stops. A movement in a corridor to her left catches her attention. There is nothing or nobody there. But there is still the sense that something _had_ moved. Perhaps, an echo of a movement. Baze drifts down that corridor.

A sense of familiarity builds, until it is less of a sense and more of a certainty of presence. The presence of the moment when Chirrut lays her head on Baze’s shoulder, when they grab at each other’s waists and wobble three-legged along the Temple walls, early mornings. When Chirrut smiles with her head half-angled into evening sunshine leaning through the window, so it looks like she’s bleaching away into dust motes and vague light.

The presence of her is both overwhelming and beyond frustration. Baze quickens her step, turning into another passageway, pushing through doors and empty rooms.

She glances to the left and sees Chirrut, drifting down a set of stairs. A trick of light, because there is no Chirrut and there are no steps. But Baze has seen her, and the image sticks. Chirrut fumbling, her hands on walls of smoke, her feet disappearing down spectral stairs.

_Don’t go down those stairs_ , she wants to shout. _Wait for me, can or not!_

“Chirrut?”

A flicker of heat on her wrist. Baze holds the kyber crystal up and examines it. She says Chirrut’s name again, softer, directs her voice toward the crystal. An opaque swirl passes beneath its surface, the briefest of shadows trapped within the stone.

Then in her head: _Baze_.

Did she dream it? The note of her name, Chirrut’s voice threading through her thoughts, a singular beat of clarity. The crystal grows warmer against her skin.

“Chirrut, is that _you_ \- somewhere? If it’s really you--,” she breaks off.

_Be calm. Be at peace._ ” Guardian Douma taught them in their beginner’s meditation sessions. _The best Guardians can find peace in the busiest crowd, in the fiercest of storms, in the eye of a nuclear reactor._

She clears her thoughts with tremendous effort, calls forth Chirrut's voice, her image. Recites the First Mantra of the Guardians. _I fear nothing. I am one with the Force. The Force is with me. The Force is with Chirrut. All is as the Force wills. The Force is with Chirrut._

The image of Chirrut wavers behind a pillar, flame-edged and unsteady. Another image further along, Chirrut with her back to Baze. Another and another, fleeting impressions of Chirrut’s journey, dissipating even as they flicker to existence, like holographic displays from a faulty projector. Baze follows the trail of these images, dreamlike. The kyber crystal is a hot, burning cell beneath her sleeve. She grips it between her fingers, pressing its angles into her flesh. Chirrut had been along this way before, _is_ here, somehow, calling to her.

_The kyber chambers_. The thought strikes, clear as the morning bell.

“Novice Malbus?”

It’s Master Ilzah, frowning at her.

“Chirrut is in the kyber caverns,” Baze says, breathless. “Please let me go in. Don’t ask me how I know--I just--I know she’s there.”

“The crystal chambers are rarely left unattended. There’s always a Guardian down below at all hours of the day. Even if Novice Imwe managed to get in, someone would have found her.”

“She’s there.” Baze bites her lip. “I know she is, okay.”

She shows them the hot kyber crystal and the burgeoning blister on her palm.

Master Ilzah does not question her further. Their features are furrowed with concern. “Come.”

They stride ahead but Baze keeps up easily, her heart pulsing in her head, in her mouth. They lead her along a hallway where the walls seethe and bulge with semi-formed sculptures of various imaginings, like incomplete conceptions rising and sinking back into sandstone. There are runes and writings cut into the stone, symbols too ancient and arcane for novices. This area is usually out of bounds for most novices. At the end of the passageway is a heavy door. Master Ilzah taps in the access code, undergoes a series of biometric scans from the sedentary and very old wall droid.

The door glides open.

It is hard to tell how much of the kyber caverns were sentient-constructed and how much were formed organically, heaved into place over the aeons of Jedhan geologic time. There are steps, a long trail of them, the same stairs, Baze realises, that she glimpsed Chirrut going down.

The light is dim and velvety; if there are lamps, they are hidden in the crevices and folds of stone, for ambience rather than effective illumination. If there are generators, they have been fine-tuned to eliminate all background disruption to the atmosphere of the kyber chambers.

The crystals begin to speckle the walls along the stairway, lightly at first, and then constellating at greater densities the deeper they descend into the chambers. At the bottom, the walls and ceiling of the chambers are split by thick rivers of light from the crystals.

Beneath the surface of the whole moon is a nexus of abundant kyber caves, the glimmering arteries of Jedha, but the purest and the most refined of crystals are found in the caverns beneath the Temple of the Whills. These are the jewelled roots of Jedha City, and if you’re lucky enough, you can hear them sing. Chirrut is one of those supposedly fortunate ones, though she’d always regarded her sensitivity to them as a curse rather than a blessing. Kyber from these caves are only given sparingly, never for commercial purposes, and only by a Guardian. There is movement here in these caves, not wind, but something far less tangible. Something that is not easy to grasp if one has no concept of the Force. Unseen tides ebb and flow around Baze, seeping into her, through her, moving through the spaces of her soul. She feels both atomised and unified here, broken into parts and fused into a larger harmony, of which she can only imagine a tiny fraction.

“The forms of kyber here are purest in Jedha,” says Master Ilzah. “There is a reason why most novices aren't allowed down here. Especially if one is attuned to their resonances, like Chirrut Imwe is. You need to be exposed to them in small quantities over short periods of time, train your mind to build up tolerance to their vibrations, or the physiological effects can be damaging.”

“She cannot stand the kyber,” says Baze shortly.

She doesn't have the time to listen to Master Ilzah, or admire the unearthly glimmer of the kyber formations any longer. Chirrut's presence tides over her, pulls at an unyielding point deep within her core, and magnetically, she moves, through the caverns, pushing past Master Ilzah.

“There is nobody here,” Master Ilzah calls after her, but Baze ignores them.

She senses Chirrut and locates her with absolute certainty before even seeing her. An alcove in the wall, narrow enough for someone like Chirrut to get in. And Baze knows Chirrut’s love of interstices, transitional cavities and small forgotten spaces, and the peace that she finds in them. Sure enough, Chirrut is sitting in the alcove, knees pulled to chest, crystals clustering around her, a frenzy of stars. Her face, buried in her hands.

Baze kneels at the entrance of the alcove. “Chirrut. _Chirrut_!”

Chirrut removes her hands, her mouth a slack bloom of surprise. Her eyes are closed. “Baze? You’re _really_ here. I mean I tried to reach out to you--didn’t know it would work—but--”

“I heard you. Don’t know how but I heard you. Like you were inside my head or something.”

“Actually,” says Chirrut, the tiniest crook of a smile at the corners of her lips, “I was under your feet.”

Baze suppresses a groan. “You went missing for five days. What are you even doing? I went looking for you--have you been here all that time? And Master Ilzah is here.”

Chirrut stiffens. “You called Ilzah-sifu?”

“I needed to get inside here mah. Because I’m not you, okay. Your ways are like one kind, I really don’t even know how you do these things. And you still never say why you’re down here in the first place.”

Chirrut’s eyes are still closed. “I didn’t know I was gone for so many days. I didn’t feel it.”

There is a frailness to Chirrut that Baze has never seen before. And for whatever reason, she won’t move out of that narrow recess she’s in.

“Imwe-novice.” Master Ilzah has joined Baze.

Chirrut’s fingers curl, gripping at her knees. “Sifu.”

“Open your eyes.” There is a toneless and awful calm to Master Ilzah’s words that sends a shiver up Baze’s spine.

Chirrut doesn’t. “I felt the Force. For once I felt it. The Force called me down here. If you--if you feel the Force calling you for the first time ever, you follow, right? Please, you must understand.”

She seems to be addressing Baze rather than Master Ilzah. But Baze doesn’t understand. Because how the hell does anybody even understand the things Chirrut does, sometimes?

“Since when you believe so much in the Force?” Baze’s voice is rough.

“Baze.” Chirrut’s voice is desperate. “Tell me you understand. Or that you will. Or that you believe in what the Force wills, as you tell me all the time. Everything is as the Force wills.”

“What you on about?” Baze is harsher than usual, because she is completely bewildered. “Talk later, can or not? You come out of there first. Let me help you.”

“Open your eyes, Imwe-novice,” Master Ilzah says again. “And then Malbus-novice will get you to the infirmary.”

And Chirrut opens her eyes.

 

***

 

Chirrut opens her eyes and does not look at Baze, will probably never be able to look at Baze again.

She lies flat on the med bed at the Temple infirmary, her hands at her sides, palms upturned. Such tranquillity. Maybe she’s pretending only, Baze thinks.

Chirrut had been given plenty of rehydration fluids and food, which she’d wolfed down with an alarming ferocity.  

Guardian Thanh shines a medical scanner into Chirrut’s pupils. Chirrut blinks and her forehead ridges into a frown. Her eyes, now pale and turbid, can still detect light, then. Guardian Thanh uploads the data from scanner to computer, and the report flashes onscreen, text scrolling down and down and down.

Baze watches the whole procedure from the foot of Chirrut’s bed. Her tongue is a stone tablet in her mouth, a blockage of speech.

“You haven’t said much since the kyber chambers,” Chirrut says. Her sightless gaze is directed toward the ceiling.

“I’ll leave you two for a bit while I go download and process that report.” Guardian Thanh picks up a datapad and inputs something into it. They direct a fixed stare at Baze, who looks back unenthusiastically. They gesture their head slightly towards Chirrut, before leaving.

Baze slowly moves to stand beside Chirrut’s bed, by her face.

Chirrut once had dark eyes, the ends whetted into arrowheads, those indicators of sparkling rebellion. The irises immense and curious, shades of dark and darker brown, a gradation to the pitch-black points of the centres. Chirrut and Baze used to fool around when they were much younger, trying to hypnotise each other. They swung pendulous objects in front of the other’s eyes, and Chirrut would often say in a deep, hoarse and idiotic sounding voice: _look into my eyeeeeeesssss and beeeee miiiiiiine Baze Malbusssssssss_. With the sibilance and everything.

(It never worked)

But Baze looked into Chirrut’s eyes all those times anyway, and imagined the nuances of brown as darkening spirals drilling into untold depths. An odd pleasure dug its way into the pit of her stomach.

Or maybe it worked, Baze doesn’t know for sure.

She can keep looking into those eyes now, but they’re so terrifyingly different. _White_ . _Blue_ . Inaccessible. She hates herself for thinking this. But she can’t shake the alien quality of Chirrut’s gaze clean from her head. Chirrut Imwe, some sightless mystic stranger lying on a med bed before her. _Don’t. Don’t think like that._

“I can hear you thinking.”

Baze chooses her words carefully. “Hah. Can you hear _what_ I’m thinking, though?”

“No, but your question is very telling.”

“Sorry.” Baze doesn’t know what else to say.

Guardian Thanh comes back in, much to her relief, a holopad in their hands.  A silvery 3D rotating projection of a human eye, complete with labels, attached to different anatomical features. _Cornea. Retina. Lens. Sclera. Optic disc. Vitreous humour._

“So, Guardian, what’s the news?” Chirrut is disturbingly light-hearted. She props herself up on the med bed.

Guardian Thanh does not return her smile. “Your condition is not reversible.”

Baze sucks in a breath, reeling.

But Chirrut only answers: “I was called. I heard the crystals that night. Felt them. Why doesn’t that count for anything? You all always teach about kyber harmonies and their importance to the Force all the time what.”

“Novice Imwe.” Guardian Thanh does not flinch at Chirrut’s defensiveness. “That’s not all. A scan of your eyes showed traces of unknown inhibitor substances in the aqueous and vitreous humours. As well as some structural damage from possibly unsanctioned medical techniques.”

“So? That means what?” Baze fights to get the words out, her throat suddenly flaccid.

“You have been seeking treatment from sources outside of the Temple,” they continue, “and they may have done more harm than good.”

There is a silence. Chirrut, in a small voice, admits. “I was desperate. I was afraid.”

And then to Baze’s immense disbelief, she pipes right up: “But the kyber crystals and the Force have both saved me after all. I was going to go blind anyway. So I was right. I was right to go down there.”

Baze drags her hand across a side table, and her fingers close around several stoppered glass receptacles. She crushes them within her fist and the splinters of pain feel good. “You are blind. Tell me how are you in any fucking way _saved_?”

“Hah,” says Chirrut. “There’s your voice at last.”

Guardian Thanh drops a gentle hand on Baze’s shoulder. “Go back to your lessons. Novice Imwe will stay here.”

“Will you come see me later?” Chirrut calls after her, but she doesn’t answer, doesn’t even bother to look back.

 

***

 

The five days that Baze spent looking for her are nothing but a blotch of time to Chirrut. There is nothing about them that she can measure. All she knows is for five days she sat in the light in the heart of Jedha.

She remembers when it started: the acute flashing in her vision, the cresting panic in her chest, the slow and inexorable greying of the world. The night when she got out of bed, when an energy greater than her own will and her own stubbornness guided her down to the kyber chambers. How she opened the doors she’ll never quite remember, and she won’t be able to do it again.

She can’t even recall with precise detail what the kyber caverns look like, because by then she could see nothing but shadows, indecipherable outlines in bright light.

Then there were the kyber resonances. Their volume was almost unbearable, and their oscillations thrummed through her, passed through her flesh, into the marrow of her bones. They rang high and low, plunging and careening in pitch, approximating an equilibrial note that she couldn’t align herself with.

Until she sat still. Until she remembered Ilzah-sifu’s teachings and their endless diatribes about her lack of commitment to zama-shiwo.

_If you are still, then stillness becomes you, and you, stillness._

Stasis, the first form of zama-shiwo, that Ilzah-sifu had made her learn.

If she were nothing but stone, but clay, but a mesa, but an egg laid on the plateau of a mesa, fertilising in the meagre heat of Jedha. She imagined herself the egg, hatching, breaking through slivers of wet shell, dressed in scales, parchment-fleshed. She grew outward without moving, coils and coils of growth, and yet her core remained still, until she lost any sense of origins, until she wasn’t sure whether she was snake or substrate, or was she Jedha City itself?

And when she was still, the kyber in her head piped down. When she kept her thoughts calm, when she spread her mind thin and permeable to the world around her.

Chirrut remembers the kyber radiance webbing across her faulty eyes until she was wreathed in it.

Had five days really passed like that? If Baze hadn’t found her, would she have stayed in there for another five? Ten?

All she knows, the one thing that woke her from that incandescent stupor, from that temporal malfunction, was a different note. An interference in the wavelike resonances-- external, and jarringly familiar. The note came from high above, from beyond the singing ceiling, from the world of Jedha above, and it had a name.

_Baze_. Somehow she could hear Baze, follow the trail of her discord, call to Baze, through the Force, through the kyber. Draw Baze to her.

It’s harder now that she’s out of the kyber chambers. Her troubled eyesight is gone, and in a way, it feels like some kind of release. The inevitable had come and gone. The worst of her terrors had struck and then passed her by.

She wants to ask now what. But whatever the answer is, there’s only one thing that’s certain: there’s no going back. Only the certitude of her choice. That, she supposes, must be faith. Or the tentative beginnings of it.

She must ask Baze more about this. Baze knows more about faith than Chirrut ever will.

Guardian Thanh does not allow her to leave just yet, so Chirrut remains in the infirmary, restless, tuned in to the kyber. She waits for Baze.

 

***

 

Baze takes her anger out on Danang during training. After she knocks him down, she smacks the end of the practice staff into his jaw. Master Arshish hauls her backward, yelling words that she can’t quite register. Danang spits blood and curses.

But once he’s got the blood out of his mouth, he manages the grace to bow, palms together. Unlike her.

 

***

 

“I thought,” says Baze, accusing, “we were going to leave Jedha together. Find somewhere, fix your eyesight. That’s what you agreed, yes or not.”

She is visiting Chirrut after all. Though she’d made sure to come as late as possible. A part of her was disappointed when she found Chirrut still awake.

“I don’t need fixing. I needed healing. And I have been healed.”

“You and I have very different definitions of what it means to be healed.”

Chirrut is sitting cross-legged on the bed. There is a cane leaning against the wall next to her. It looks vaguely familiar. “You’re going to complete your fifth duan. You’re going to be the best Guardian there ever will be. I know it.”

Baze scoffs. “And if I don’t care about being a Guardian any more, huh?”

“You’re chosen by the Force.”

“If you listen to Venerable Master Sameshtra’s lectures at all, then so is everybody else.”

Chirrut is silent for a moment. She gestures toward the cane beside her bed. “My new walking stick. You like or not?”

Baze reaches for it, automatically begins whirling it around like a training staff. The end catches the handle of a jug, sending it smashing to the floor.

Chirrut grins. “And I thought I was the blind one.”

“Isn’t this the rotan that Guardian Tallah used to hit you with?”

“Ya. You noticed.” Her smile widens. “Guardian Tallah visited me. Very strange one her visit. Especially now she doesn’t go anywhere without that rotan.  She said she’s sorry about what happened to me. Anyway, I stole the rotan from her. Good memories leh.”

“I know we’re supposed to speak respectfully of our elders,” Baze says, “but sometimes I think that one got serious problem one.”

“I can leave the medbay tomorrow, Guardian Thanh said,” Chirrut carries on. “I’ll be back in classes and training with you. I just wish I didn’t waste so much time in the past. I never understood why you studied so hard, why you wanted to be a Guardian so much. Or why you’d leave your family and home just to learn the ways of the Force. I know now. Like--like my eyes _open_ already.”

If Chirrut doesn’t stop talking. If this girl doesn’t shut the fuck up. How she can keep on talking like that? Like nothing has changed. Baze starts picking up shards of the jug.

Chirrut swings her legs off the bed. She feels for the wall, for edges that she can latch on to. Baze automatically rises and takes her elbow. Chirrut is frowning.

“You think I can’t do it.”

“Do what?”

“Become a full Guardian lah, what else.” Chirrut stiffens in Baze’s grasp. “You won’t talk to me.  Because you think I can’t do it? That I’m blind and helpless? I always thought that even though the whole world stopped believing me you would still be here by my side.”

“No.” Baze tests the cane in her hands. It is pliable. Bends it backwards and releases one end. The whiplike exhalation is almost breathless as it shivers back into shape. “You’re perfectly capable of doing whatever you want. Maybe I don’t understand why suddenly you’re so eager to become a full Guardian. Last time you never cared. Never even believed in the Force. How many times you said so yourself. But now--now all this feels like a distraction. If you want to know the truth about what I think, I think you’re being evasive. That’s what I think.”

“I told you everything. I’m not joking about anything okay.”

“No.” Baze sets the cane down. She makes Chirrut sit back down on the bed as well. Chirrut lands with a _whump_ on the mattress. “You really haven’t.”

Chirrut is quiet for a moment. “Baze. I’m sorry.”

Baze doesn’t answer. Can’t. Resentment takes her by the throat and she hates herself for this.

“I said I’m sorry.”

“Okay.” Baze sits beside Chirrut and covers her face in her hands, trying to fight the stinging in her eyes.

Chirrut laughs. She leaps off the bed and falls to her knees in front of Baze, arms lifted in mock supplication. “I can beg for forgiveness if you want. Look, I’ll do it now. Look! I have lied and betrayed your trust and I beg--”

Baze can’t bear this crap any longer. She hooks her palms under Chirrut’s arms and hauls her up. “ _Not funny okay!_ Everything like a fucking joke to you, is it?”

“Baze.” Chirrut’s sightless ghost-blue eyes looking-not-looking at her.

“You’re blind,” she says at last.

“Yes it _looks_ like it. But you know, I’m the one who’s blind. So then why are you being so mou ngan tai like that?”

“Stop it! Doesn’t this mean anything to you?”

The smile fades a little from Chirrut’s face. The smallest of muscles twitch along her jaw. “Why don’t you tell me then? Go on.”

Baze exhales. Her hands dig into Chirrut’s shoulders. Chirrut does not flinch.

“You won’t ever see the Holy City again. You love this city. You never want to leave and now you’ll never even see how it looks like anymore.”

“I already know how it looks like,” Chirrut answers. “But okay. Continue.”

“You won’t see---the—the sky.”

“Fine.”

“Desert.”

“Okay.”

“This Temple.”

A pause. “Okay.”

“Or. Your stupid fucking turtles that you like so much.”

Chirrut shrugs in impatience. Shrugs Baze’s grip off her. “I know how they all look like. It’s not about seeing like that. And why is it so important that I see all those things at all?”

“You won't,” Baze starts and stops, tries again. Her words catch over each other. “You won't ever see my face again.”

There. She's said it. Nothing but vanity. She stands there, filleted by shame. After everything, she's just selfish. She doesn't want to be here any longer.

But Chirrut stops her from going. She gently puts her hands to Baze's face and Baze nearly pushes her away. Nearly. Chirrut runs her hands steadily, mapping the shape of Baze's face, and Baze feels the flesh of Chirrut's palms, feels the shape of her own face beneath Chirrut's gentle hands, feels the shape of understanding, feels the new language of touch that both she and Chirrut will have to navigate from now on.

“I can see your face,” says Chirrut. “And I'll always be able to see it, as long as you're near.”

She drops her hands and sinks back down onto the bed, her gaze distracted, her already-glazed eyes looking emptier than ever. Baze stays beside her. They sit in silence for awhile.

Chirrut runs her hand over her head. Her hair is getting long, going against Temple regulations as usual. “Guardian Thanh’s got scissors in that cabinet drawer over there. Can you trim my hair?”

“No,” says Baze, irritated. “So late already. I'm going to bed. Anyway you never cared about keeping your hair neat before.”

Chirrut only tilts her head, continuing to rub circles on her scalp.

“Okay! Fine. I do for you,” snaps Baze.

She yanks open the cabinet and snatches up the scissors. She cuts Chirrut's hair, haphazardly at first, snipping off the long strands, but then the point of the scissors nicks Chirrut's scalp, just by her ear. The blade is sharp enough to draw blood. Chirrut barely flinches--must be all that zama-shiwo restraint--but Baze can sense that tiny electroshock of pain that zips up from beneath Chirrut's skin, through her very own fingertips. The slight, sudden intake of breath.

“Sorry,” Baze mumbles.

“Never mind lah. Just leave it.”

But Baze doesn't. She cleans the cut with gauze and an antiseptic. She looks at the stained gauze for a long time. The darkening spot of blood. She presses it to her bottom lip without knowing why. Crumples it and hurls it across the room. Then she puts her arms around Chirrut and cries and cries into the back of Chirrut's scalp.

 

***

 

“Imwe-novice,” Ilzah-sifu says, “you will hold that stance for the full hour if you do not concentrate.”

Chirrut has been out of the infirmary for a month now and Ilzah-sifu has not let up with their training. There are new novices in their class now, all of them hand-picked by Ilzah-sifu, which means they had to undergo the same ridiculous and incomprehensible selection process.

She crooks her knees, raises her hands. Closes her eyes. Meditation in motion. She can sense the resonances of the kyber, the slant of sunlight, the angle of the wind. She has no more visuals of the world. That is that. She really is irreversibly and conclusively blind. If she didn't know the Temple as well as she did, if Baze hadn't been with her those first few weeks of her leaving the infirmary, maybe things would have been more daunting. Maybe she wouldn't even be here.

Baze is not here now. Baze has left the Temple. She'd left with the permission of Guardian Douma to make the rare visit to her family, and she hadn't asked Chirrut to come along.

Chirrut remembers that night in the infirmary, the night after Baze found her in the kyber caverns. Baze and her unexpected tears.

“No,” Baze had said, roughly, when Chirrut tried to twist her body around, comfort Baze in whatever way she could. “Don't turn around.”

Chirrut felt the thin blade of hurt slice through her. It must be her eyes.

They lay there on the med bed, Baze curled around Chirrut's back. Eventually she started kissing the nape of Chirrut’s neck, awkwardly at first, then along the side of her throat and the back of her shoulder. Chirrut leaned her head back further, reaching an arm behind to touch the back of Baze’s head, let her face be framed within the crook of her elbow.

Baze pressed feverish lips against the side of Chirrut’s mouth. She gave Chirrut’s med gown an abrupt tug, surprising her, pulling it off her shoulder and hiking the hem high above Chirrut’s chest, exposing her legs and stomach and breasts. Baze fumbled with her own pants and robes and their legs tangled together, the sudden warmth of each other’s skin a disconcerting reality. Baze was not gentle. Her hand probed hard between Chirrut’s legs, fingers kneading a frenzied orbit around her clit. Chirrut moaned when she felt Baze’s fingers inside her. She was dry and the friction of Baze’s fingers sent a twinge of pain through her. But the pain drew a deep ache out of her, and wet warmth seeped out of her, Baze smearing her inner thighs with it.

Chirrut put her hand over Baze’s, slid Baze’s hand upward along the length of her body to her mouth. She sucked Baze’s fingers, at the salt and the wet of Baze’s fingers.

Baze hissed, rubbing and grinding against Chirrut’s rear, caressing and teasing at Chirrut’s nipples, pushing her teeth into the give of Chirrut’s shoulder. Chirrut’s free hand slipped backwards, wriggled between the press of their bodies, found the mesh of Baze’s pelvic hair and Baze’s breath seized against her shoulder, her voice still fractured from the recent tears. They came together, grinding, gripping at each other, bruising into each other’s heat.

Something hard nudges Chirrut in her stomach and she momentarily loses balance, breaking her form.

“I said, concentrate!” Ilzah-sifu grates. “If you’d been concentrating, you could have taken the blow, no matter how unexpected.”

Chirrut resumes her stance and releases Baze from the clutches of her mind.

 

***

 

Ah-Mak and Ah-Bu are perfectly framed in the window. Ah-Bu in her loose trousers and apron, setting a cup of tea before Ah-Mak, who has her arms folded on the table. In the centre of the table, a small burner, puffing out spirals of fragrant steam.

“Lim lah,” Ah-Bu says.

Ah-Mak stares at the tea, then turns her demure smile up to her wife, without saying anything.

“Chav,” says Ah-Bu, her eyebrow a familiar arch of annoyance.

“Last time,” says Ah-Mak, picking up the hot cup gingerly, “you said it was Chav but it wasn’t.”

Ah-Bu snorts. “That was what, three months ago? Anyway, what’s so bad about Tarine also I don’t know.”

Ah-Mak makes a face. “Taste like that what-you-call-it beizicao or something. So bitter. But when you tambah gula lagi worse.”

Outside the window, Baze falters. The scene is a familiar one, a domestic diorama. Long ago, years ago, she was in it, fidgeting at the table, being told off by one mother, being defended by the other, sometimes the two of them switching roles.

Now she’s an intruder. After all, she’d renounced her own mothers, hadn’t she? Chosen a life at the Temple over them. She can’t even remember why she’d chosen that path. And if she’s really honest with herself--if she sits herself down and examines every single detail for every single choice she’s made, it’s not going to be any much clearer.

She swallows. In her hands are two large sunflowers, cut from the prolific, raging growth in the family greenhouse. She’d cut them automatically, without thinking why. Only now, looking at their white-flecked petals, and the large scarlet asterid heads, peppered with black, does she realise that she’d taken them for Chirrut.

For her mothers, she has a set of twin pendants in her pocket, cheap gifts purchased from the souk. She didn’t have a lot of credits to buy anything better. But these aren’t important.

What’s important is the next step she makes. What’s important is reconciliation, and her mothers are just the first step.

Baze takes a deep breath and knocks on the door.

 

***

 

Chirrut feels the edge of the sunflower heads, the petals skimming across her finger tips. “What colour are they?”

“Red. White.” Baze hesitates. Then: “Maybe blue.”

Chirrut laughs. She’s been waiting at the Temple gates as often as she can, since Baze left. Baze is back now, her presence so strangely muted that Chirrut would have missed her completely had she not dropped the sunflowers in her lap. Baze takes her hand and they walk into the Temple compound together. Baze smells different. Brackish water, earth and sweat.

“I was working at my family’s greenhouse. Cutting their plants down. Managing the growth.”

Something about Baze is on the cusp of breaking. All she feels around Baze are fractures, tiny hairline cracks converging and destabilising her. She has to be careful around Baze.

They pass Ilzah-sifu who stops them.

“Isn’t it time for your zama-shiwo session?” Ilzah-sifu says, but the sternness in their voice is half-hearted. Chirrut can feel Ilzah-sifu’s gaze on their linked hands. Another day, and they’ll have to address this with the Guardians.

Zama-shiwo is the last thing on her mind now, but she shrugs. “I’ll go to the training yard now.”

“And take Malbus-novice with you.”

Baze whirls around, a rush of disturbance in the air. “ _What_?”

“You’re going to sit the tests for the fifth duan.” Ilzah-sifu starts to walk away. “Zama-shiwo has helpful techniques and any novice training to be a full Guardian should at least know the basics. But they’re not easy, as Imwe-novice can tell you.”

Chirrut starts to laugh. Baze walks beside her, astonished.

 

***

 

In Jedha City, it is night.

If Chirrut and Baze look back from where they are sitting on the wall of the Temple, they will see the city, the lights and the night time buzz of the souk, the midnight walk of the pilgrims, the lit street shrines.

But they are not looking that way. Instead, they’re sitting on the back wall that skirts the edge of the mesa, and their legs hang over the steep ramp that slopes down from the back of the Temple, to the desert. A thick roll of mist is just dissolving between the stony dunes.

“Tomorrow I start the testing for fifth duan.” Baze sounds almost surprised at this.

“All is as the Force wills,” Chirrut answers, next to her.

“Really,” says Baze. It's neither a question nor an affirmation.

But it's true. Must be.

For Chirrut, it's a slow process, coming to terms with the concept that all pathways are possible in the Force, and all possibilities are pathways of the Force. But the only one that matters is what you’re grateful for. How strange it is to be Force-attuned, to be able to hear and sense the crystal resonances, the roots of the city, their purity of pattern and the way they attest to the presence of the living Force. But how much more strange it is to _not_ be attuned to them, to have never heard any of these.

She runs a finger over her eyelid. What does it mean to see? What does it mean to be blind?

_You give up something,_ Ilzah-sifu told her, _you gain something else._

The wind will die down soon, and then it will just be cold. There'll be frost on the dunes tomorrow morning, tiny icicles dangling off the edge of the mesa, until they melt in Jedha's weak noonday sun. Next to her, Baze is breathing steadily, her body exhaling solid warmth. She reaches a hand up and touches the wide swerve of Baze's ear. Her finger is cold and Baze recoils, always self-conscious of her ears. She brushes a thumb across Baze's eyelashes, feeling pinpricks of grit. Or the rind of old tears, maybe?

“I'll be gone for three months for the testing.” Baze speaks into the cup of Chirrut's palm. Chirrut moves closer. There's space. “And more than half the time I'll be living like some kind of hermit in some isolated settlement.”

“You'll survive.”

“And you?”

“Hah. I'm not _that_ blind.”

“You're completely blind.” There is a hint of concern in Baze's light tone. “Yesterday you just walked straight into Guardian Tallah in the middle of the corridor.”

“That one I did on purpose.”

Baze snorts, shakes her head. This girl, hopeless case one.

That last visit to her family, to her mothers, their disbelief when they opened the door giving way to elation. The way they ran their hands all over her shorn head and her face, ushered her in, held her at arm’s length while they studied her, squeezed her between them, fought over her, made her sit and served her two kinds of tea, even though it should have been the other way round. The way they watched her, Ah-Mak scrubbing tears out of her eyes, Ah-Bu firing up the cooker, the unspoken question that lingered between the three of them, ghostlike and raw.

“I'm going back,” Baze said. Hating the words. “I have to.”

“Because she got cha bor peng iu liao!” Li Ee called in through the window and Baze shot a glare at that crazy woman.

Ah-Mak kissed her cheek and Ah-Bu held Baze’s head to her chest. She could stay like this for an age. But she didn't. She came back to the Temple. For Chirrut. Always for Chirrut.

The desert sprawls before them, the dunes and mesas diminished by distance. Everything appears small until you get down amongst them, down in the desert. Then it swallows you. Unless you trust in the Force, the Guardians say, you're lost. Unless you learn to see with more than your eyes, all you'll get will be rocks, sand, those half-sculptures lying around, their origins lost. The debris of Jedha’s tablelands.

Something catches Baze's eye. Behind the nearest mesa, a curious glint, greenish. Something reflective. She cranes her neck to get a better view.

Baze is fairly sure it's Khaokhun Oasis, the very place Chirrut had brought her all those years ago, their first stupid crazy adventure together, the time Chirrut had nearly got them both killed, and in doing so, saved her life. Those waters, jade green in the glow of NaJedha, exhaling vapours. The lake would be smaller now, shrunken, because it hasn't rained for years. Because they've both got older.

“What is it?” Chirrut asks, beside her.

“Nothing,” says Baze. “Just rocks. Dunes. Cliffs. The desert.”

And yet Chirrut smiles. “Beautiful enough.”

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> When I was writing the zama-shiwo bits, I kept thinking about that time when I was a kid & my mum used to drag me to her free community hei gung (qigong) class during some week nights, & it would be like 8-10pm outdoors, & half that time I had to stand still with my eyes closed, sweating profusely, and "let the qi move through the body" or something. And behind me there would be some uncle doing very vigorous kungfu movements and such, as directed by the qi. (I was never very good at that, sorry)
> 
> But anyway, thank you so much for reading! I know this last part was a long time coming but I got distracted by a lot of things & i haven't been in a happy place in RL but I'm just glad I managed to finish this.
> 
> I started writing this in February & it was just going to be some light-hearted not-very-serious Manglish kind of thing, mostly for myself, but then I got a bit too invested in it & shit went downhill lol. I'm still trying to convince myself this is some kind of happy ending, sigh.
> 
> Thank you once again for reading, & thank you if you've left kudos or commented. It really does mean a lot to me. ^.^ I hope you've enjoyed this bit of lesbian spiritassassin. You can talk to me on [tumblr](http://anagrammaddict.tumblr.com) & rec me with all the lesbian or nb spiritassassin fics.


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